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ARM AND HAMMER SERIES 

Edited by Lucien Sanial 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 



All this chorus of calumny, which the 
party of order never fail, in their orgies of 
blood, to raise against their victims, only 
proves that the bourgeois of our days con- 
siders himself the legitimate successor to 
the baron of old, who thought every weapon 
in his own hand fair against the plebeian, 
while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon 
of any kind constituted a crime. 

Karl Marx. 



Copyright, 1902, by New York Labor News Company 



THE PARIS COMMUNE 



INCLUDING 



The "First Manifesto of the International on the Franco-Prussian 

IVar," the ^'Second Manifesto of the International on the 

Franco-Trussian IVar,^' " The Civil fVar in France " 



BY 

KARL lyiARX 

Author of "Capital," "Poverty of Philosophy," "Value, 
Price, and Profit," " Wage-Labor and Capital," 
"Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bona- 
parte," etc. 



WITH INTRODUCTION BY 

FREDERICK ENGELS 
» 

PREFACE AND NOTES TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

BY 

LUCIEN SANIAL 



NEW YORK 

NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY 

1902 



3ac3n 

.n3 



THE BALANCE-SHEET OF BOUR- 
GEOIS VENGEANCE. 

Twenty-five thousand men, women, and 
children killed dviring the battle or after; 
three thousand at least dead in the prisons, 
the pontoons, the forts, or in consequence 
of maladies contracted during their cap- 
tivity; thirteen thousand seven hundred 
condemned, most of them for life; seventy 
thousand women, children, and old men de- 
prived of their natural supporters or thrown 
out of France; one hundred and eleven 
thousand victims at least. That is the bal- 
ance-sheet of the bourgeois vengeance for 
the solitary insurrection of the eighteenth of 
March. 

What a lesson of revolutionary vigor 
given to the workingmen! The governing 
classes shoot in a lump without taking the 
trouble to select hostages. Their vengeance 
lasts not an hour; neither years nor vic- 
tims appease it; they make of it an admin- 
istrative function, methodical and contin- 
uous. 

Lissagaray's ^^ History of the Commune 

ofisrir 



I j^ 






PUBLISHERS' NOTE 



The two manifestoes on the Franco-Prussian War and 
the essay on the Civil War in France, which form the 
bulk of this volume, were originally issued in 1870 and 
1 87 1 by the General Council of the International Work- 
ingmen's Association, as will be seen by the dates affixed 
to the documents. The Twentieth Century Press, of 
London, England, reprinted them a few years ago in a 
pamphlet entitled The Commune of Paris, the pamphlet 
including an abridgment of Frederick Engels' introduc- 
tion to the standard German edition of The Civil War 
in France, which was published in Berlin in 1891. 

In an edition recently issued by a New York publisher, 
the two manifestoes on the Franco-Prussian War are 
omitted, and the English abridgment of Engels' intro- 
duction is still further abridged to make it conform to 
the absence of the omitted documents. 

Deeming it but just to both Marx and Engels that 
their work should be given to the public in an unabridged 
form, we present in this volume the first complete edition 
of the essays by Marx and the introduction by Engels 
published in the English language. 

The only liberty we have taken with the text is the 
addition of chapter titles to The Civil War in France. 

In the Appendix will be found (i) a translation of 
the anti-plebiscite manifesto, referred to on pages 23 and 
24; (2) further details regarding "Bloody Week," con- 



vi PUBLISHERS' NOTE 

sisting of a compilation of testimony from capitalist 
sources, with brief comments on the same by Lucien 
Sanial; (3) the reply of the Secretary of the General 
Council of the International to Jules Favre's circular letter 
of June 6, 1871 ; (4) the personnel of the General Council 
of the International when the manifestoes on the Franco- 
Prussian War and the Civil War in France were issued. 
These documents throw additional light on the events of 
1870 and the tragedy of 1871. 

New York Labor News Company. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Publishers' Note v 

Preface to American Edition, by Lucien Sanial - - ix 
Introduction to the German Edition, by Frederick 

Engels - - - I 

THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION 
ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 

First Manifesto — The Declaration of War - - - 21 

Second Manifesto — After Sedan - ' " - - 31 

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

CHAPTER 

I. The National Defense 47 

II. The Eighteenth of March 60 

III. The Historic Significance of the Commune - 70 ' 

IV, The Repression 90 

APPENDIX 

Anti-Plebiscite Manifesto - - - - - - - 107 

"Bloody Week" no 

Jules Favre on the International 114 

Personnel of the General Council of the Interna- 
tional 116 



EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 



Were it not for certain happenings of recent date in 
the international socialist movement, which give to the 
contents of this book an additional interest, there would 
be no occasion here for a lengthy preface. The three 
manifestoes of the International Workingmen's Asso- 
ciation, issued from the pen of Karl Marx in 1870-71, 
and supplemented by an introduction which his life- 
long friend and co-laborer Frederick Engels wrote 
twenty years later, speak indeed for themselves. Inso- 
much as their perfect understanding by the present gen- 
eration may require an ampler and truer knowledge of 
certain important events therein briefly mentioned than 
can be obtained from the " historic " works of capitalist 
mouthpieces, a footnote has been appended wherever an 
explanation or comment seemed most needful. But, 
realizing the insufficiency of annotations for the pur- 
pose in view, as well as their interference with the con- 
centration of the reader's mind upon the text, the editor 
has sparingly resorted to this mode of information, pre- 
ferring to refer the student to Lissagaray's admirable 
History of the Commune for a methodical and reliable 
presentation of nearly all the facts which it is essential 
to know in order to grasp, in their fulness and verity, 
the historic, philosophic, and economic generalizations 



IX 



X PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

embodied by Marx in those stirring appeals to the class- 
consciousness and class - solidarity of the proletarian 
masses throughout the world. 

This is, we believe, the first time that a complete edi- 
tion of these imperishable documents, including also, un- 
abridged and carefully translated, Frederick Engels* in- 
troduction, has been published in the English language. 
They are in themselves historic facts ; and while it is the 
unquestionable right of any one to comment upon them, 
or to produce, in the course of an argument, literal ex- 
tracts from them, provided always that the sense of the 
quoted text is not modified by the context, it belongs to 
nobody to alter them in any way, even if the declared ob- 
ject or tacit purpose of the alteration is to correct a 
" mistake," or to eliminate a " doubtful statement," or to 
supply a " deficiency." 

We deem it here appropriate to insist upon the strict 
observance of this ethical rule in the treatment of his- 
toric papers, because in a French edition of these mani- 
festoes which has lately appeared in Paris the " trans- 
lator " has deliberately suppressed some important pas- 
sages. For one of these suppressions he gives in an 
appendix the following reasons : '' I have thought it my 
duty to expunge here a few lines from the English 
text. They contain imputations which then had cur- 
rency, but several of which, concerning Jules Favre, 
Ernest and Arthur Picard, can no longer be justified. 
Another, against Jules Ferry, is the most inexact of all, 
but may be explained both by his violent ' moderantism * 
and his administrative incapacity as mayor of Paris." 
The " few " lines thus omitted are in our own edition 
the forty-nine in number, beginning on page 50 with 
these words, " Shortly after the conclusion of the ar- 
mistice, etc.," and ending on page 51 with this sentence, 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xi 

*' The day on which he [Ferry] would have to give an 
account of his maladministration would be the day of his 
conviction." 

It falls under the sense that the only proper way for the 
scrupulous translator to act in this matter, was to give 
the full text of Marx's specific charges against the men 
involved, and to produce in a footnote, or in his ap- 
pendix, the evidence (or at least the references thereto) 
upon which he declared that " several " of these charges 
were unfounded, thus at the same time leaving untouched 
and standing those that were " justified." As we write, 
we understand that the forgeries of Favre on the birth 
registers of a mairie, and the interested care which 
Ernest Picard took of his blackleg brother, are ^' facts " 
which have never been successfully controverted; while 
in the light of the stupendous jobbery which in later 
years, when Jules Ferry was prime minister, attended his 
policy of colonial expansion, we dare say that " the 
integrity of his incapacity " on any previous occasion 
would have to be strongly demonstrated before Karl 
Marx himself, if he were still alive, would permit his 
own words to be retracted for him by any translator. 

Another omission — entirely unexplained and even 
passed over without so much as a dotted line to indi- 
cate it — is to be noticed in the following sentence (page 
6y), the words here in brackets being those that were 
suppressed : " Galliffet, [the kept man of his wife, so 
notorious for her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of 
the Second Empire,] boasted in a proclamation of having 
commanded the murder of a small troop of National 
Guards," etc. Is not this true, every word of it? And 
if all of it is terrible truth, was it Galliffet or his wife 
that the translator generously considered in suppress- 
ing that part of it? Surely the licentious marchioness 



xii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

neither deserved nor desired so much consideration ; 
while her cruel husband showed little pity of any sort 
to the communards' honest wives, whom he shot after 
insulting them. Both were equally brazen-faced in their 
respective fields. Should it be claimed that the trans- 
lator's intention was not to render Galliffet less odious 
to himself or to others than he should be, since the 
references to his cold-blooded murders were not sup- 
pressed, it might be observed that he, Galliffet, far from 
deeming himself odious for his diabolical brutalities, ever 
took pride in them; esteemed them, indeed, military 
achievements of the highest order. And he lived in a 
world that took the same view of such matters, in which, 
therefore, he was not a monster but a hero, and the 
opinion of which was for him the only opinion. But 
to be " the kept man of a shameless wife " ! Fie, even 
for a general of the Second Empire. 

We don't know that much light may be cast upon the 
mental operations of the French translator in question 
by stating that he is none else than Charles Longuet,^ 
ex-member of the Paris Commune and Karl Marx's 
son-in-law, now a Millerandist, that is, a convert to the 
" new method " of " socialist union," even with such as 
Galliffet. Aiitres temps, mitres nioeurs. At any rate, his 
sins of omission are mere peccadilloes by the side of his 
sins of commission; which we must also notice here, 
simply because they typify the " tactics " lately adopted 
by a motley crowd of so-called " intellectual socialists," 
and consisting sometimes, as in the present case, in lu- 
dicrous attempts to stand Marx upon his head and in 
that posture make him see as they do. 

On the title page of Longuet's French edition is given 

* La Commune de Paris. Karl Marx. Traduction, preface et notes de 
Charles Longuet, Paris, 1901. 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xiu 

as epigraph the following quotation from the manifesto 
on the Paris Commune : 

" The working class did not expect miracles from the 
Commune. They have no ready-made Utopias to intro- 
duce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to 
work out their own emancipation, and along with it that 
higher form to which present society is irresistibly tend- 
ing by its economic agencies, they will have to pass 
through long struggles, through a series of historic pro- 
cesses, transforming circumstances and men." 

Upon this text Longuet, commenting in his preface 
and appendix, actually " transforms Karl Marx into a 
precursor of Millerand " ; a feat, however, which he re- 
grets that the Ministerialist majority of the Paris Inter- 
national Congress (held in 1900), by failing to avail 
itself of this quotation, did not give Jules Guesde an op- 
portunity to perform. In his own words, " Marx 
combated by Guesde — that would, indeed, have been 
piquant ! " 

Of course, according to Longuet, had Marx lived long 
enough to attend that memorable congress, he would 
have, then and there, voted for the Kautsky resolution. 
He — who knew so well the irrepressible, merciless char- 
acter of the class struggle, and to whom, therefore, any 
scheme of compromission with any fraction, or faction, 
of the bourgeoisie, at any time, anywhere, or for any 
purpose, was abhorrent as a crime against the proletariat 
— would have sanctioned, by his weighty approval, this 
great Act of Cowardice, unprecedented in the annals of 
international socialism ! How could he have done other- 
wise? Would not Longuet have told him, as he now 
tells us, that the Kautsky resolution " corroborates 
Marx's view [as expressed in the above quotation], 
which is as true to-day as it was in 1871, notwithstand- 



xiv PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

ing the advance made since then by the economic forces 
of society and the transforming idea?" 

Perchance, however, Marx might have indignantly 
repudiated such " corroboration " of his views. He might 
have said, in substance : " Go to, scheming logomachists ! 
Away with your Kautsky resolution! Even that — bad 
as it is and contemptible economically and politically — 
can be no cloak at all for your treachery to the prole- 
tariat. For, while it displays extraordinary cowardice 
in not reprobating unconditionally and forbidding in- 
stantly, in the name of international solidarity, your min- 
isterial " tactics " and so-called " new method," it at least 
disapproves of them in language sufficiently suggestive, 
despite its incongruities, to cause their immediate aban- 
donment by any one of you that may still honestly claim 
to be a socialist; that is, by every man who, temporarily 
waylaid in your ministerialist ranks, is of other sort 
than the bourgeois politician, unscrupulous arriviste, 
speculating in socialism." 

For analytical purposes this document may be divided 
into three parts, which we shall briefly consider here 
seriatim, omitting criticisms which, ever so important in 
themselves, are relatively of a second order. 

The first part (literally translated, like the others, 
from the French text) reads as follows : 

" In a modern democratic State, the conquest of the 
political power by the proletariat cannot be the result of 
a coup-de-main, but of a long and painful work of pro- 
letarian organization in the economic and the political 
fields, of the physical and moral regeneration of the 
laboring class, and of the gradual conquest of the munic- 
ipalities and legislative assemblies. 

" But, in those countries where the governmental 
power is centralized, it cannot be conquered fragmentar- 
ily." 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xv 

It is upon the opening paragraph of this first part that 
the French MinisteriaHsts, through their mouthpiece Lon- 
guet, rest their claim of " corroboration." It is, indeed, 
as we shall see, the only passage in the whole resolution 
that may be said to bear a certain relation to Marx's 
words quoted by Longuet. But, to use a favorite ex- 
pression of Marx, it is the relation of a "parody" to 
the original play. 

Supposing it was Kautsky's intention to thus " cor- 
roborate " his great master in economics, the latter might 
have turned from Longuet to him and asked : " Where 
did you see in any of my writings that I made the con- 
quest of the political power by the proletariat — in other 
words, the Social Revolution — dependent upon ' the phys- 
ical and moral regeneration ' of the workers ? Is not the 
proletariat to-day strong enough, physically, to drive 
from power the degenerates who exploit it? Is it not, 
indeed, by its own strong arms that all the battles of 
those degenerates are fought, even against its own flesh 
and blood? What proportion of the total amount of 
human muscle and endurance, wasted in war or spent in 
industry, comes from the other classes? Again, is not 
the proletariat moral enough for all the immediate pur- 
poses of the Social Revolution, through which alone it 
can enter an era of higher morality and physical im- 
provement ? As a body is it not, in fact, the most moral 
of the classes into which the exploitation of the indus- 
trious by the idle — fundamental immorality, source of 
nearly all forms of private and public degradation — ^has 
divided the human race? Look at the proletarians of '71, 
or at those of '48, or at any of those who, in various coun- 
tries and at different times before and since, suffered 
martyrdom in the cause of social justice; did they fail be- 
cause they were physical wrecks and moral deformities ? " 



xvi PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

To these questions the answer is obvious. Manifestly, 
it is neither physical strength nor moral sense that is 
now wanting in the proletariat. And precisely because 
the natural tendency of capitalism is to stunt and demor- 
alize a constantly growing number of wage-workers; 
precisely because, with its development, a condition must 
ultimately prevail that will be the very reverse of that 
improvement which in the Kautsky savant e consultation 
is absurdly considered as a not only possible but essential 
preliminary to the Social Revolution; it becomes more 
and more imperative to hasten the day when the pro- 
letariat can victoriously and securely proclaim itself for- 
ever the absolute master of its own destinies. 

How to accomplish this is the very problem which 
Marx has solved. He solved it theoretically by his mas- 
terly analysis of the class struggle, and practically by the 
synthesis of it which he carried out as far as he could 
with the undeveloped elements then within his reach. 
In the Workingmen's International Association, which he 
founded ; in its principles, which he formulated ; in its 
work, which he superintended ; and in its ultimate result, 
which is the class-conscious, uncompromising and only 
bona fide socialism of the present day, we have that syn- 
thesis so far as the revolutionary process has now gone, 
but with all the elements required for its completion, to- 
gether with the plainest rules for the increase of their 
power and the elimination of retarding factors. 

Those elements, already powerful, but as yet insuf- 
ficiently so to bring about the Social Revolution,^ are: 

* By this expression, the Social Revolution, is here meant not a mere 
insurrection, ever so widespread or temporarily successful, yet liable to be 
drowned in blood and followed by a new lease of life for the old social 
order, but the abolition of the present economic system with its consequent 
political class rule, and the substitution therefor of the Socialist Common- 
wealth, leaving aside all consideration, purely speculative at the present 
time, of the circumstances under which the change may take place. 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xvii 

(i) a clear and widespread knowledge, among the pro- 
letarian masses, of the great historic facts and funda- 
mental economic truths upon which socialism is estab- 
lished; (2) a consequent class-consciousness and class- 
solidarity, all pervading, ever wakeful, highly sensitive 
to every act of oppression committed by capitalists or 
their political agents, and manifesting itself by extensive 
organization in the economic^ and the political fields; it 
being understood that the two branches of this prole- 
tarian organization, without intrenching on each other's 
field, shall be closely allied, strictly conducted on parallel 
class lines, and strongly self-disciplined. 

Aye, these are the elements upon the development of 
which, at a constantly increasing rate, depends the has- 
tening of the day when the Social Revolution shall be 
not only achievable but achieved. In the course of their 
progress they must reach a point where they will make 
short work of retarding factors, such, for instance, as 
may produce Millerandisms and Kautsky resolutions; a 

* It may seem quite superfluous to observe that that part of the prole- 
tarian organization which is here termed ** economic," and which has here- 
tofore been generally limited, in its use by the workers of English-speaking 
nationalities, to the single purpose of mutual protection in their daily con- 
flicts with employers, should not be confounded with the great economic 
organization which it is the object of the social-revolutionary movement 
to substitute for capitalism. Yet this confusion is sometimes resorted 
to by logomachists of the anarchistic and " pure-and-simple " trade unionist 
schools, who oppose independent proletarian action in the political field. 
By vigorous amputation and gross misrepresentation of Karl Marx's words 
(in the Declaration of Principles of the International) concerning the neces- 
sary " subordination " of the " political " movement to its great end, the 
" economic " emancipation of the working class, they argue that the po- 
litical movement is of secondary importance, that it is even demoralizing, 
and that the " economic movement " — by which they mean trade unionism 
pure and simple — not only is sufficient to bring about the emancipation of 
the proletariat, but can alone accomplish it. At the same time they are 
found in America supporting the corrupt and corrupting bourgeois parties, 
with all the zeal which their hatred of socialism and schemes of personal 
advantage can inspire, while in France they similarly make common cause 
with the Millerandists against the Parti Otivrier Frangais, 



xviii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

point where the proletariat will remain deaf to the frantic 
appeals and deceitful promises of the small labor ex- 
ploiters who now compose the moribund middle-class; 
a point, in short, where its accumulated experience will 
have crystallized into a logical, inexorable rule of con- 
duct. 

In the meantime the class-conscious fraction of the 
proletariat, ever growing in numbers and knowledge, 
will, indeed, " conquer municipalities." It will also in- 
crease its representation in those legislative assemblies 
that are directly elected by the people, without as yet 
" conquering " them, however, since the " conquest " of 
such bodies implies that a majority of the people are 
ready for the Social Revolution, imperatively demand it, 
and would therefore proclaim it themselves if their rep- 
resentatives proved so recreant to their plain duty as to 
delay action. 

But in what spirit and for what purpose will those 
municipalities be conquered and those legislative seats be 
carried ? In a " Christian-Socialist " spirit ? To slowly, 
" painfully," one step at a time, accomplish the " phys- 
ical and moral regeneration of the working class " ? And 
with this far-away end in view — thoroughly Utopian, 
after all, as we have previously seen — to lengthen the 
agony of the proletariat by compromises with the small 
middle class, calculated to retard the progress of capital- 
ist concentration? May we here ask also, by the way, 
where is that " modern democratic State " in which the 
municipalities are not subject to the higher legislative 
and executive powers that are now and will remain till 
Revolution Day controlled by the capitalist class; or in 
which the legislative branch directly elected by the people 
cannot be checked at every step by a senate or suchlike 
contrivance for the perpetuation of class rule? 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xix 

No, no! But in the social-revolutionary spirit of un- 
dying opposition and fearless defiance. To take strategic 
positions in view of the final battle, and from there cease- 
lessly bombard the citadel of oppression; to thus and 
otherwise, by constant agitation from every point of 
vantage that may be gained, educate the proletarian 
masses, enlighten their blind discontent and transform 
it into a clear-minded resolve; to so organize them that 
every conflict in which they may be engaged, every 
victory they may win, and every reverse they may suffer, 
shall alike serve as object lessons to intensify their class- 
consciousness and class-solidarity; to do, in short, all 
that can be done along the straight line of the class strug- 
gle and do it quickly, then challenge the enemy to undo 
it; such is the great work, and the sole mission, of a 
social-revolutionary party. 

We now come to the second part of the Kautsky re- 
solution. It reads as follows: 

" The entrance of an Isolated socialist in a bourgeois 
government cannot be considered as the normal begin- 
ning of the conquest of the political power, but only as 
a necessary expedient (expedient force), transitory and 
exceptional. 

" Whether, in a particular case, the political situation 
necessitates this dangerous experiment, is a question 
of tactics and not of principle; the International Con- 
gress has not to pronounce itself upon that point; but, 
in any case, the entrance of a socialist in a bourgeois 
government affords no hope of good results for the mili- 
tant proletariat, unless the Socialist Party, in its great 
majority, approves of such an act, and the socialist min- 
ister remains the mandatary of his party. 

" In the contrary case, of this minister becoming in- 
dependent of this party, or representing only a portion 
of it, his intervention in a bourgeois government threat- 
ens the militant proletariat wit;h disorganization and 



XX PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

confusion; it threatens to weaken instead of fortifying 
it, and to hinder instead of promoting the conquest of 
the public powers." 

It is in that second part, and especially in the second 
paragraph of it, that lies the " Act of Cowardice." 

There was before the International Congress an issue 
of fundamental importance, involving as it did the at- 
titude of the militant proletariat towards the bourgeoisie 
throughout the world. It was a burning issue. Upon its 
immediate and definite settlement depended the harmo- 
nious working, nationally and internationally, of the so- 
cialist forces. The concrete form which it had already 
assumed in France was at that very moment "threaten- 
ing disorganization and confusion " in the great move- 
ment of that country, while in other parts certain ten- 
dencies, ominous of similar evils, were boldly emerging 
from a long dormant state. Yet, precisely because of its 
obvious magnitude, of its far-reaching import, of its ex- 
treme urgency, and of the concrete forcefulness with 
which it presented itself in France, the Congress took 
fright, and, instead of facing it squarely, ran away from 
it, circuitously, by the Kautsky diplomatic back-door. 

Can a militant socialist accept office from a bour- 
geois government? Such was the plain question. A 
plain Yes or No was the direct answer, the only answer, 
which it called for. 

But the reply of the Congress was neither of those two 
briefest yet plainest of words. By an artifice of language 
which a Metternich would not have disavowed, this 
simplest of questions was turned into a complex problem, 
a tangle, in fact an impossibility. Observe the process. 

First of all, its general importance is dwarfed by lo- 
calizing it. To be sure, we are told that " the entrance 
of an isolated socialist in a bourgeois government " 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxi 

can never and nowhere " be considered as the beginning 
of the conquest of the poHtical power," but we are told 
also that in countries where such an event occurs it may 
be considered as an expedient force, of a temporary and 
exceptional character, like the circumstances which may 
necessitate it. 

The back-door is now wide open. Circumstances are 
not the same at all times and in all countries. Manifestly, 
then, " whether in a particular case the political situation 
necessitates this dangerous experiment, is a question of 
(particular, local) tactics, and not of (general, uni- 
versal) principle." And thereupon the Congress declares 
itself incompetent, impotent. Non possumus. The ques- 
tion is dodged. The act of cowardice is consummated. 

But the question will not down. It still faces the Con- 
gress, reproachfully : — " What are you here for, with all 
your past declarations of international solidarity? You 
have settled nothing. You have, in fact, done terribly 
worse than nothing; you have actually laid the founda- 
tion of universal strife between the clear-minded, class- 
conscious, bona fide socialists, and the honest but un- 
wary fraction of the proletariat, which ambitious ar- 
rivistes may now, to their heart's content, delude with 
false promises of improvement at the hands of bourgeois 
governments." Whereupon the Congress — that same 
Congress which the previous instant declined to legislate 
on a fundamental question of so-called " tactics," even 
though it involved a still more fundamental question of 
principle — undertakes to redeem itself by providing tac- 
tical checks and other tactical rules to be observed in the 
hazardous operation of making a " socialist " into a bour- 
geois minister. 

As it always happens in cases of flagrant inconsistency, 
the Congress succeeded only in adding to the pile of its 



xxii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

previous blunders. True, it subjected the " dangerous 
experiment " (or expedient force) to conditions that ap- 
parently made it incumbent upon the '' socialist " min- 
ister Millerand to instantly resign his portfolio if he had 
any respect for that international body, and upon his 
" socialist " supporters to immediately repudiate him if 
he failed to do so. But, in that circuitous phraseology 
which consists in substituting the conditional for the 
positive form of speech, it actually held out the hope that 
some ** good " might result from such an experiment if 
** the Socialist Party, in its great majority, approved 
of it." ^ 

Of course, the Ministerialists were not slow in availing 
themselves of this declaration. They boldly claimed that 
they were "the great majority" of the Socialist Party 
of France ; and in order to make their claim good before 
the world they immediately set to the task of " wiping 
the earth " with their mighty opponent, the Parti Ouvrier 
Frangais. This was for them a second expedient force, 
and, like the previous one, it was a " dangerous experi- 
ment." They did their best, however, and failed mis- 
erably. 

The third and last part of the document under consid- 
eration is an addition made to the original Kautsky mo- 
tion by the eminent Russian delegate Plechanoff, who 
was otherwise opposed to that motion. It is as follows: 

" At any rate, the Congress is of opinion, that, even 
in those extreme cases, the socialist minister must resign 

* Upon this point, the delegate of the Socialist Labor Party of the United 
States, speaking in the Ninth Commission of the Congress (where the 
Kautsky resolution was first considered), observed: *' It was with intense 
disgust that the militant socialists of America heard of Millerand's sponta- 
neous acceptance of a portfolio in the Waldeck-Galliffet bourgeois combina- 
tion; but it would have been with an inexpressible sentiment of horror that 
they would have heard of such an act having been committed by order of 
the organized socialists of France." 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxiii 

his office in the cabinet when the party organization 
recognizes that the latter gives evident proofs of partial- 
ity between labor and capital." 

This addition was obviously intended by its author 
as a summons served by International Socialism upon 
Millerand to withdraw from the bourgeois cabinet of 
France, in view of its infamous conduct towards the pro- 
letariat, as illustrated by the then recent massacres of un- 
armed strikers at Martinique and Chalon. But (prob- 
ably because it was written in great haste) it was 
manifestly deficient, in that it left absolutely intact the 
spirit as well as the letter of the original motion, and un- 
fortunately defective in that its last words, " partiality 
between capital and labor,'* are highly objectionable from 
the scientific standpoint of socialism. There can be no 
more partiality or impartiality between capital and labor 
— ^that is, to be absolutely correct, between the capitalist 
class and the laboring class — than between the robber 
and the robbed. 

In conclusion of this criticism of the Kautsky resolu- 
tion, which has been here forced upon us by Longuet's 
preface to Marx's international manifesto on the Paris 
Commune, we may now briefly consider that resolution 
in its relation to another act of the Paris Congress. 

We have already noted the inconsistency of that body 
in declaring itself incompetent to decide upon a funda- 
mental question of so-called tactics and in the same 
breath providing rules for the prosecution of such tactics. 
But this was by no means its only or most flagrant act 
of self-contradiction. On its first working day, its very 
first act was to decree the formation of an International 
Bureau, by unanimously and enthusiastically adopting a 
resolution from which we quote the following preamble 
and article 4 ; 



XXIV PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

" Whereas, it is incumbent upon the International 
Sociahst Congresses, destined as they are to become 
the parHament of the proletarian class, to adopt reso- 
lutions for the guidance of that class in its struggle for 
emancipation; and whereas these resolutions constitute 
an international agreement, which must be carried out; 
the Congress decides .... Art. 4. — The Inter- 
national Socialist Committee^ shall exact [sic, in the 
French text, exigera] from the national socialist par- 
liamentary groups, that they organize an International 
Socialist Commission, composed of such of their own 
members as they may select, for the purpose of facilitat- 
ing the common action of socialist representatives in the 
various parliaments on all the great political and inter- 
national questions. This commission shall be adjoined 
to the International Socialist Committee." 

Here, then, was a Congress asserting itself as the 
world's labor parliament, whose powers were such, in 
its own declared opinion, that it could not only institute 
an executive to carry out its decisions and those of 
its predecessors, but order the socialist representatives 
elected to the parliaments of various countries to come 
together under the supervision of that executive and in 
cooperation with it determine the policy — the tactics — 
which all must adopt concerning matters that may in any 
way affect the laboring class. Yet, two days later, this 
same Congress, by adopting the Kautsky resolution, 
declared itself impotent to take action upon a matter 
that was causing a deeper agitation in the world's pro- 
letariat than had been produced by any other event since 
the Paris Commune. 

Let us, indeed, thank Longuet for his suggestive 
audacity; by all means let us compare Marx's manifesto 
on the fall of the Commune with the Kautsky resolution. 

* A permanent representative body, created by Art. i, Sec. 2, of this reso- 
lution, and composed of two delegates from each nationality. 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxv 

Each of these two documents is the characteristic prod- 
uct of a distinct epoch in the history of sociaHsm, and in 
the spirit which they respectively display, as in the circum- 
stances attending their respective appearance, they present 
a contrast that has no parallel in the socialist movement. 

It was at the end of 1864 that the Workingmen's Inter- 
national Association, projected by Marx in 1862, was 
finally constituted. At that time Louis Bonaparte, ever so 
distrusted by every government on the face of the earth, 
was still kindly looked upon and gratefully remembered 
by the mercantile classes of Europe as the " Society- 
Savior " who, in strangling the French Republic, had 
most contributed to the reestablishment of " order " on 
the Continent, and apparently brought to an end the ir- 
repressible conflict between the bourgeoisie and the revo- 
lutionary proletariat of France. The events of 1848 had 
indeed made it quite plain that a revolution in France was 
apt to be quickly followed in other countries by similar 
upheavals, far more injurious to capitalist interests than 
any foreign war could be. Therefore, while the foreign 
schemes of Louis Bonaparte were watched in diplomatic 
circles and preparations were made to defeat them by the 
force of arms if necessary, his domestic rule was deemed 
everywhere by labor exploiters a general guarantee of 
" economic peace " between the classes. In the thirteen 
years that his exemplary despotism had already lasted, 
not a ripple of proletarian discontent had been permitted 
to ruffle the smooth surface of " business " ; and while 
socialism had passed into Germany, where Marx's writ- 
ings and Lassalle's agitation had begun its transforma- 
tion from a sentimental Utopia into a scientific certainty, 
its very name, practically expunged from the French lan- 
guage by the Bonapartist police, had become an almost 
foreign word in the land of its birth. 



xxvi PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

Manifestly, Louis Bonaparte was the chief obstacle to 
the revival of that proletarian movement which had al- 
ready made itself felt as a powerful factor in the various 
uprisings of 1848. True, as above stated, socialism in 
its perfected form was effecting a lodgment in Germany. 
But Germany was still a conglomeration of States widely 
differing in economic and political conditions. The par- 
tial awakening, here and there, of some local bodies 
among the many that composed her working class could 
not yet be of such general import and widespread in- 
fluence as must have attached to an equal display of 
vigor by the more compact proletariat of France; and 
so long as this recognized leader in the social-revolu- 
tionary process lay seemingly unconscious and helpless 
under the yoke of a vulgar despot, the German socialists, 
hampered at every step in their agitation by the repres- 
sive measures of their own petty tyrants, could only pre- 
pare their own ground and await developments. 

Necessarily, then, the first aim of the International 
Association must have been to gain a strong foothold in 
France, with a special view to the abolition of the Bona- 
partist regime. Marx realized that among the French 
militants that could be enlisted for this arduous task, 
there were but few, if any, whose economic knowledge 
was sound and safe. He was aware of the fact that most 
of them were incoherently imbued with Proudhonist 
notions of " gratuitous credit," '' banques du peuple," and 
other middle-class reform quackery, which they inno- 
cently believed, upon the word of Proudhon himself, to 
be the essence of scientific and practical socialism. But 
he knew also that the class spirit, fomented from time 
immemorial by class persecution, and intensified by the 
stupendous acts of bourgeois treachery repeatedly com- 
mitted from 1789 to 1848, was highly developed in the 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxvii 

French proletariat. In this he rightly saw the basic 
element of proletarian organization. Straight into that 
organization, more and more class-conscious, the newly 
discovered economic truth would naturally, irresistibly, 
force its way, driving out of it the fogs of sophistry.^ 

The class struggle, to be sure, is not a principle, it is 
a fact; but in the clear perception of it at all times and 
under all circumstances, lies the fundamental require- 
ment of correct tactics. Once the class struggle is fully 
seen in the broad light of history, once its inexorable 
and irrepressible character is fully comprehended, class 
compromise logically becomes an obvious impossibility, 
which it were Utopian or criminal according to motive, 
and inevitably most harmful, to attempt or to commend 
as a proletarian policy. There can be no end to the 
class struggle, and no relief from its horrors, until the 
battle shall have been fought out to a finish; that is, 
until the working class, the only class fit to survive, the 
only class, in fact, that cannot die, shall have won it. 

In that spirit and upon those lines the International 
gained in France the required foothold. We know the 
sequel. " Economic peace between the classes " came 
at last to an end. It was the only title of Louis Bona- 
parte to the fidelity of the bourgeoisie. For its sake this 
class had resigned in his hand the political power; it 
had repudiated or silenced its own political mouthpieces ; 
its Orleanist and republican factions had jointly disowned 
in his favor their respective political idols ; it had tamely 
submitted to the reckless extravagance of his corrupt 
court; it had patiently borne the steadily increasing 
burden of taxation, for which its scandalous enrichment 

^ With such a spirit, economic education of the right sort is fiot only 
possible, but fruitful. Without it — as in the case of the Longuets and the 
Bernsteins — the best education is of little avail; to those who, aware of the 
right, profess the wrong, knowledge is an intolerable burden. 



xxviii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

could not be deemed a compensation, since the sources 
from which it was derived, even when they consisted 
in pubHc franchises, were its " legitimate " property and 
could not be fructified but through its " enterprise, in- 
dustry, abstinence " ; it had countenanced foreign pol- 
icies, dangerous ventures, costly expeditions, which it 
could not approve; it had, in short, sacrificed itself on 
the altar of patriotism. All to no purpose, as it now 
seemed. What would that decayed old bunco man ever 
be good for, anyhow ? And while the proletariat attacks 
the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie attacks the Bonaparte, 
who vainly does his best to defend it. The Second Em- 
pire becomes a pandemonium ; war to Germany is de- 
clared; ignominiously falls the imperial mountebank. 

Then does the class battle reach its climax. The 
bourgeoisie rushes on to seize the power. The armed 
proletariat bars the way. The Commune is proclaimed. 

The Commune is conquered ; the Commune is mur- 
dered. Is its spirit dead? Read the manifesto. 

The class war has only begun. Between the classes 
the chasm now is as wide and as deep as the infinite. 
Jump into it, ye compromisers ! 

Bleeding" and prostrated, the French proletariat must 
be given time to recover its breath. It is the turn of 
Germany to struggle; Germany, no longer a dust of 
petty States, but a great nation, imperialized and united 
right in the face of that cowardly bourgeoisie that paid 
Bismarck five round milliards of labor-created wealth 
for the right to slaughter its own wage-slaves. Back 
to Berlin went Wilhelm the Great. He had seen the 
Commune expire ; he found her ghost sitting on his impe- 
rial throne. 

For nineteen years the merciless conflict raged night 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxix 

and day, extending gradually to all parts of the Empire, 
until the giant Bismarck himself fell by the wayside, a 
sore giant indeed, unhorsed by Socialism and kicked by 
his little master. And on that day of famous victory, 
up again went the old cry of the dying Commune, the 
old cry of Marx, the old cry of all socialist veterans, a 
mighty cry now, hurled at the stupefied enemy by four- 
teen hundred thousand German proletaires, " No Com- 
promise ! " 

Nor had all been still in the proletarian world outside 
of Germany. As early as 1878, the now great Parti 
Ouvrier Frangais had been founded by Jules Guesde, 
with a programme approved by Marx. The Labor Party 
of Belgium had followed in 1884. Successively the other 
European countries had fallen into line, and in 1889 the 
Socialist Labor Party of the United States had recon- 
stituted itself on its present platform and tactical lines. 
To this general movement the German victory gave a 
tremendous impetus, the birth of a new International 
far more powerful than the first, appeared certain, and 
everywhere ceaselessly the fight went on, in the same 
spirit, under the same banner, bearing the same motto, 
" No Compromise ! " 

Moreover, economic developments in the Old World 
and the New, political affairs domestic and foreign — 
everything was apparently shaping itself for a decisive 
encounter. How, when and where it would begin, no 
one as yet presumed to tell. Nor did any one desire to 
precipitate it: the socialists, because every day brought 
them new strength ; the capitalists, because in three coun- 
tries at least they trembled in their stolen boots. But 
every one felt that some unexpected incident might bring 
it about. In France especially, the bourgeoisie was ut- 
terly demoralized ; " incapable," according to Jaures 



XXX PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

himself, " of action or reaction " ; so that in this partic- 
ular country even more than in any other, the " No Com- 
promise " fundamental rule of sociaHst tactics seemed to 
have the force of a self-evident proposition. 

Then came Millerand, with his portfolio and his bu- 
reaux de tabac. 

His self-appointed mission was to save the bourgeois 
republic in the name of Socialism, with the sword of 
Galliffet. 

To be sure, in the domain of the unexpected nothing 
could be more startling. 

A commonplace incident (the ''Dreyfus affair"), an 
act of violent injustice committed by military members 
of the oppressing class upon one of their fellows, had been 
so worked up by " socialists," so-called, of the eleventh 
hour, as to totally eclipse the multitude of acts not less 
infamous committed by the same class upon the prole- 
tariat. And the result was — not, of course, the Social 
Revolution, not the relaxing, for one moment, of class 
injustice and class oppression, not even the rehabilitation 
of Dreyfus and the punishment of his torturers, but the 
entrance of a " socialist," hand in hand with the mur- 
derer Galliffet, in the bourgeois government, quickly fol- 
lowed by the participation of that " socialist minister " 
in the massacres of strikers at Martinique and Chalon. 

Did a cry of indignation arise, unanimous, from every 
" socialist " quarter throughout the world ? No ; a cry 
of horror arose, deep and significant, but it was not 
" unanimous." 

Why ? What had happened to thus suddenly " trans- 
form circumstances and men " ? And was this, indeed, 
the kind of transformation expected by Marx? 

The answer to these questions is simple enough. A 
man is not " transformed " by merely changing his name. 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxxi 

Circumstances even, will not " transform " him, if they 
are such only that, by deceitfully professing a change 
of views and sentiments, he can best subserve his self- 
ish interest. No sooner had socialism given ample 
evidence of its enormous power of expansion, than it 
became a most attractive field of exploitation to intel- 
lectual schemers and profit-seekers. In the wake of those 
undesirable accessions came others still more dangerous 
and in greater number ; men belonging, body and soul, to 
the doomed middle class, ignorantly seeking relief from 
the pressure of capitalist concentration in " reforms " of 
a so-called " socialist kind," and " therefore " calling 
themselves " socialists." From that moment the apparent 
growth of the socialist movement was abnormal, and its 
real spirit was correspondingly impaired. " It lost in 
depth what it gained in surface." Or, to tell the full 
truth, a detached body of the bourgeoisie, finding the 
proletarian citadel closed to compromission, had treach- 
erously stolen into it in socialist garb and under the 
socialist banner. 

It may well be conceived that many of the veterans 
viewed with intense disgust this turn of affairs. But, 
even in Germany, where Bernstein's recent somersault 
from Marxism into Middle-classism had raised their in- 
dignation to a very high pitch, courage was obviously 
wanting to take vigorous action against the unsound 
fraction of the party. Marx was dead ; Engels was dead ; 
Liebknecht was dying. The vague formulas, " Socialist 
Unity," " Freedom of Opinion," etc., which the logoma- 
chists of the " new method " used with apparent magical 
effect upon the unwary rank and file, seemed to paralyze 
the surviving leaders of the Marxian epoch. Most of 
these could not contemplate with equanimity the possible 
decrease of the " socialist vote " that might result from 



xxxii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

a split of the " socialist forces." Moreover, it must be 
admitted that some of them — as was glaringly shown by 
Auer's speech at the Paris International Congress — had 
very actually been "transformed" — backward — ^by the 
Millerand circumstance. In Belgium — as shown not less 
plainly by the speeches of Anseele and Furnemont — the 
same kind of " transformation " had taken place to a still 
greater extent. Visions of portfolios presented to social- 
ists on a golden salver, bearing the inscription. Expedient 
Force, would by no means be idle dreams in that country, 
where an alliance with the " Liberal " bourgeoisie, if con- 
tracted for the "temporary" purpose of substituting 
equal suffrage for the present plural system, might be 
indefinitely continued for other objects, not less " neces- 
sary," and rendered every day more imperative by other 
circumstances, not less " exceptional " — as had already 
long been the case in France with the Waldeck-Millerand 
combination when the Congress met. 

It falls under the sense that everywhere the wage- 
working, bona fide socialists were sorely perplexed. Un- 
questionably, the participation of a socialist in a bour- 
geois government was equally repugnant to their feelings 
and to their reason. But they were advised to keep cool, 
to be patient. This was only a French tempest that 
would soon blow over; a family quarrel that would 
terminate in a wonderful love-feast. From a German 
standpoint, for instance, Millerand might have acted too 
impulsively; but the matter was pressing, and while the 
divided organization of the French party afforded him 
no means of getting in time its collective permission " to 
save the republic," no doubt could be entertained that a 
vast majority of it sustained him. The Guesdists were 
right enough in " principle," but too stalwart in " tactics " 
on this " exceptional " occasion. " They should not di- 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxxiu 

vide the party by opposing him." He was an honest man, 
an able man also ; and since he was " there " he should 
be given a chance to carry out " his " good intentions, 
to develop " his " plans, and to show to the world what 
a socialist minister could do, even when hampered by 
bourgeois colleagues. — And the international proletariat 
kept very cool, very patient, hoping that its delegates to 
the Paris Congress might succeed in restoring harmony 
" in France," but in the meantime growing very watch- 
ful, and very thoughtful also, concerning harmony in 
other countries. 

It is safe to say that the Kautsky resolution did not 
meet with its unanimous and unqualified approval; that 
the withdrawal of the Parti Ouvrier Frangais from the 
ministerially packed congress of the French organiza- 
tions held immediately after the International body had 
adjourned, did not greatly surprise it; that the further 
withdrawal of the Blanquists and the Communists, be- 
sides important trade federations, from the similarly 
packed Lyons " Congress of Unity " a few months later, 
was viewed with satisfaction by a large portion of it; 
and that the news of the final union of the Social- 
Revolutionary forces of France against the Ministerial- 
ists and all such bourgeois gentry, was greeted with in- 
tense delight by all true socialists, whose rallying cry is, 
and must remain till the glad evening of Revolution Day, 
" No Compromise ! " 

If there are still any abroad who, mistakenly calling 
this only possible union a " split," fear its results, we 
can only deplore their intellectual blindness, despite which, 
however, they must soon perforce have to know better. 
Of Millerand's acts and " participation " we cannot un- 
dertake here to write the history. Nor is it needful that 
we should do so. With the exception of the secret use 



xxxiv PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

he made of his immense patronage — extending directly 
over the Post Office, the Customs, the national monopoly 
of tobacco manufacture and retailing, and indirectly (as 
a " participant ") over all the public services — his per- 
formances are known to the v^orld. And v^e dare say 
that no bourgeois minister can show a blacker record of 
duplicity, pretense, cunning and heartlessness in his treat- 
ment of the wage-working class. As it was on the shoul- 
ders of the proletariat that he climbed to power, it is 
well, perhaps, that he proved himself the worst deceiver 
that could, by any possibility, have " accepted " or as- 
sumed to represent it in a bourgeois government. For it 
was a valuable experience, which Marx had certainly 
not in his prophetic mind when he wrote the " Longuet 
epigraph," but which it now appears that the present gen- 
eration of workingmen had still to pass through, not- 
withstanding the terrible lessons transmitted to it by its 
predecessor of thirty years ago. 

It also goes without saying that the Non Possumus 
of the Paris Congress struck its International Bureau 
with impotency. The Second International is not a mere 
aspiration; it is an absolute necessity, more strongly im- 
posed every day by the economic, social and political 
developments. It must and shall be organized; and it 
will then be a mighty power. But, first of all, the union 
of the social-revolutionary forces must be accomplished 
in all the leading countries, as it has been in France and 
in the United States. 

In conclusion, it is in the light of all the facts above 
stated or referred to, that the Internationars Manifesto on 
the Paris Commune and the Paris Congress's Kautsky 
resolution must be read and compared. In that light is 
best seen what they truly are: one an act of sublime 
fortitude and unconquerable determination on the day 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xxxv 

of greatest darkness; the other an act of unpardonable 
cowardice, an abandonment of the highest position on the 
battlefield to a demoralized and disordered enemy at the 
turning-point of the conflict. 

LuciEN Sanial. 
New York, February, 1902. 



Introduction to the German Edition 



The invitation to prepare another edition of the ad- 
dress of the General Council of the International Work- 
ingmen's Association concerning the Civil War in France, 
and to preface it with an introduction, came to me quite 
unexpectedly. I can only, therefore, take up the most 
essential points and touch upon them very briefly. 

I prefix the two shorter addresses of the General Coun- 
cil to the longer pamphlet on the Franco-Prussian War. 
Firstly, because in the pamphlet on the Civil War ref- 
erence is made to the second address, which itself 
would not be intelligible without the first. Secondly, be- 
cause these two addresses, which are also the work of 
Marx, are, not less than the Civil War, excellent speci- 
mens of that marvelous gift of the author, first exhibited 
in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of ap- 
prehending clearly the character, the import, and the in- 
evitable consequences of great historical events, at the 
very time when these events are still unfolding them- 
selves, or have only just taken place. And lastly be- 
cause, as I write, the German people are still suffering 
from the evils consequent upon the events here con- 
sidered, as clearly foreseen and foretold by Marx. 

Has it not, indeed, come to a fulfilment, as predicted in 
the first address, that should Germany's war of defense 
against Louis Bonaparte degenerate into a war of con- 



2 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

quest against the French nation, all the calamities that 
befell the German people after the so-called wars of lib- 
eration^ would revisit them " with accumulated inten- 
sity " ? Have we not had twenty years more of Bis- 
marckian rule, and in place of the former persecution of 
the '' demagogues " have we not had the *' exceptional 
law "^ and the hounding of socialists, with the same po- 
lice tyranny and the same revolting interpretation of 
legal texts ? 

And has it not come literally true, that the annexation 
of Alsace-Lorraine would "drive France into the arms of 
Russia," and that after this annexation Germany would 
either become the acknowledged vassal of Russia, or 
would have, after a short respite, to arm herself for a new 
war ? And what a war ? A " race war of the Germans 
against the coalesced Slavs and Latins " ! Is it not a 
fact, that the annexation of the French provinces has 
driven France into the arms of Russia? Has not Bis- 
marck for twenty years courted in vain the favor of the 
Czar, and lowered himself before him with even meaner 
servility than little Prussia, before she became the " first 
great power of Europe," had been accustomed to dis- 
play at the feet of " Holy Russia " ? And does not the 
" Damocles sword " overhang us of a war, on the first day 
of which all written treaties will be blown unto the wind 
like chaff; of a war as to which nothing is certain but 
the absolute uncertainty of its issue ; of a race war which 
will expose all Europe to the devastation of fifteen or 
twenty millions of armed men, and which only hangs fire 

^ 1813-1S, against Napoleon. — Note to the American Edition. 

2 This law was passed by the German Reichstag in 1878 with the object 
of suppressing socialist agitation, confiscating the socialist press and liter- 
ature, etc. Owing to the courage and determination of the socalists, this 
" law of exception " proved a boomerang, and after twelve years of fierce 
conflict between the socialist workingmen and the capitalist government, the 
latter allowed the law to die by limitation. — Note to the Amencan Edition. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 3 

at present for the reason that even the strongest of the 
great mihtary states shrinks before the absolute uncer- 
tainty of the final result? 

All the more, therefore, is it our duty to render accessi- 
ble to the German workingmen these brilliant but half- 
forgotten documents, which attest to the far-sightedness 
of the International's proletarian policy in connection with 
the events of 1870. 

What applies to these two addresses, applies also to the 
one entitled The Civil War in France. On the 28th of 
May, the last of the combatants of the Commune were 
crushed by superior numbers on the heights of Belleville, 
and not more than two days passed, before Marx, on the 
30th, read to the General Council of the International the 
pamphlet in question, in which the historical significance 
of the Paris Commune is presented briefly, but in words 
so powerful, so incisive, and above all, so true, that there 
is no equal to it in the whole range of the extensive lit- 
erature on the subject. 

Thanks to the economic and political development of 
France since 1789, Paris has for fifty years been placed 
in such a position that no revolution could there break 
out without assuming a proletarian character, in such 
wise that the proletariat, which had bought the victory 
with its blood, would immediately thereafter put forward 
its own demands. These demands were more or less in- 
definite, and even confused, in accordance with the par- 
ticular degree of development to which the Paris work- 
men had attained at the time; but the upshot of them 
all was the abolition of the class contrast between cap- 
italist and laborer. How this was to be done, 'tis true no- 
body knew. But the demand itself, however indefinite 
its form, was a danger for the existing order of society ; 
the workmen who made it were still armed ; if the hour- 



4 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

geoisie at the head of the State would maintain their 
poHtical supremacy, they were bound to disarm the work- 
men. Accordingly, after every revolution made victo- 
rious with the arms of the workers, there arose a new 
struggle which ended with the defeat of the workers. 

This happened for the first time in 1848.^ The Liberal 
bourgeoisie of the Parliamentary opposition held reform 
banquets in favor of an electoral change which should 
assure domination to their party. In their struggles with 
the Government driven to appeal ever more to the people, 
they were obliged to admit to the front rank the Radical 
and Republican elements of the small middle class as well 

^ Of course there were In earlier days premonitions of that class-con- 
scious movement of the proletariat, which in 1848 won a first victory — 
soon, however, followed by defeat — under the circumstances here referred 
to. In Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels himself calls attention to 
the fact that " in every great bourgeois movement there were independent 
outbursts of that class which was a forerunner, more or less developed, of 
the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reforma- 
tion and the Peasants War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Miinzer; in the 
great English Revolution, the Levelers; in the great French Revolution, 
BabcEuf." To this may be added that in the seventeen years that followed 
the Revolution of 1830 (the second revolution of the French bourgeoisie, 
by which the political conquests which this class had made during its great 
revolution of 1789-93, were finally placed beyond the reach of feudal reac- 
tion), several proletarian insurrections occurred in France; and although 
the " bread question " was always instrumental in provoking them, the 
" social question " gradually assumed in them a greater importance until it 
was paramount in the minds of the insurrectionists. The first uprising 
was at Lyons in 183 1, when the canuts (silk workers) descended from the 
heights of Croix-Rousse upon the rich quarters below with a black flag on 
which was inscribed in red letters: Vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en com- 
battant (to live working or to die fighting). The subsequent outbursts at 
Lille, Saint Etienne, Limoges, and other industrial centers were of the 
same character. But in 1839 the Barbes insurrection not only was " com- 
munistic," but through the foreigners who fought in its ranks, it acquired, 
to some extent, an international character, which in the trials that fol- 
lowed was duly pointed out by the prosecuting attorneys. At the same time 
in England, the thoroughly proletarian Chartist agitation was carried on, 
coincidently with the mercantile-class movement in favor of free trade. 
The fact is that all these outbursts, insurrections, and revolutions so called, 
including 1848 and the Commune of 1871, are mere episodes of the great 
Proletarian Revolution, which is in course of accomplishment. — Note to 
the American Edition. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 5 

as of the wealthier bourgeoisie. But behind these stood 
the revolutionary workmen; and the latter had, since 
1830, acquired for themselves a far greater sense of polit- 
ical independence than even the Republicans among the 
middle classes suspected. In the moment of crisis be- 
tween Government and Opposition, the workmen inaugu- 
rated the battle in the streets ; Louis Philippe disappeared, 
and with him the electoral reform. In its stead arose the 
Republic, and moreover a republic designated by the vic- 
torious workmen themselves as the " Social Republic." 
As to what was to be understood by this " social " repub- 
lic, nobody was quite clear, not even the workmen them- 
selves. But they now had weapons, and wielded power 
in the State. So soon, therefore, as the bourgeois Repub- 
licans, who were at the head of affairs, began to feel 
somewhat firm ground under their feet, their first object 
was to disarm the workmen. To effect this, the bour- 
geoisie drove them to insurrection in June, 1848, by the 
direct breach of pledges, by scornful and defiant treat- 
ment, and by the attempt to banish the unemployed into 
a distant province. The Government had taken care to 
have an overwhelming repressive force at hand. After 
five days of heroic struggle, the workmen succumbed, 
and now followed a massacre of the defenseless prisoners, 
the like of which had not been seen since the days of the 
Civil Wars which ushered in the downfall of the Roman 
Republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie 
showed to what a mad ferocity of vengeance it can be 
stirred up, so soon as the proletariat dares to stand up 
against it as a separate class with its own interests and 
demands. And yet 1848 was child's play compared with 
their fury in 1871. 

But Nemesis straightway followed. If the proletariat 
could not as yet rule France, the bourgeoisie could not 



6 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

do so any more. At least, not at that time, when it was 
in its majority monarchical, and moreover split into three 
dynastic parties besides one Republican party. The in- 
ternal dissensions of the bourgeoisie allowed the adven- 
turer Louis Bonaparte to filch all positions of influence — 
army, police, administrative machinery — and, on Decem- 
ber 2, 1 85 1, to blow up the last stronghold of the bour- 
geoisie, the National Assembly. The Second Empire fol- 
lowed. It brought about the exploitation of France by a 
band of political and financial adventurers, but at the same 
time an industrial development such as had not been 
possible under the narrow and timid system of Louis 
Philippe, when France was under the exclusive domina- 
tion of a mere fraction of the wealthier bourgeoisie. Louis 
Bonaparte took from the capitalists their political power, 
under the pretense, on the one hand, of protecting them 
against the workers, and on the other hand of protecting 
the workers against them; but, in return for this, his 
Government favored speculation and industrial activity, 
in short, the rise and enrichment of the whole of the 
capitalist class in a hitherto unheard of degree. Corrup- 
tion and wholesale robbery, it is true, developed to a still 
greater extent at the Imperial Court and among its hang- 
ers-on, who exacted no trifling percentage of the new 
wealth accumulated by the bourgeoisie. 

But the Second Empire — that meant also the appeal to 
French Chauvinism,^ which implied the demand for the 
reacquisition of the frontier of the First Empire lost in 

1814, at the very least that of the First Repubhc. A 
French Empire within the boundaries of the old Mon- 
archy, not to say the still more circumscribed ones of 

181 5, was impossible for long. Hence the necessity of 
occasional wars and extensions of frontier ; but no exten- 

* Jingoism. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 7 

slon of frontier so dazzles the imagination of French 
Chauvinists, as that beyond the German left bank of the 
Rhine. One square mile on the Rhine was worth more 
to them than ten in the Alps or elsewhere. Given the 
Second Empire, the demand for the reacquisition of the 
left bank of the Rhine, either in the lump or piecemeal, 
was only a question of time. This time came with the 
Austro-Prussian War of 1866; but Bonaparte was jug- 
gled out of the expected territorial indemnity through 
Bismarck and his own ail-too cunning policy of hesita- 
tion. There remained nothing for Bonaparte but war 
— a war which broke out in 1870 and drove him first to 
Sedan and thence to Wilhelmshohe. 

The necessary consequence was the Paris revolution of 
the 4th of September, 1870. The Empire collapsed like a 
house of cards, the Republic was again proclaimed. But 
the enemy stood before the gates. The armies of the 
Empire were either hopelessly shut up in Metz or prison- 
ers in Germany. In this extremity the people allowed 
the Parisian deputies of the former parliament {Corps 
Legislatif) to set themselves up as the " Government of 
National Defense." This was the more readily conceded 
because, for the purpose of defense, all Parisians capable 
of bearing arms had been armed and were enrolled in 
the National Guard, of which the workmen now consti- 
tuted the great majority. But the antagonism between 
the Government, composed almost exclusively of bour- 
geois, and the armed proletariat, broke out soon. On the 
31st of October the working class battalions stormed the 
Hotel de Ville (City Hall), and took some of the mem- 
bers of the Government prisoners. Treachery, direct 
breach of faith on the part of the Government, and the 
intervention of some middle-class battalions freed them 
again, and in order not to provoke civil war inside a 



8 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

town besieged by a foreign power, the existing Govern- 
ment was permitted to remain in office. 

Finally, on the 28th of January, 1871, Paris, starved 
out, capitulated, but with honors hitherto unheard of in 
military history. The forts were surrendered, the line 
of fortifications disarmed, the weapons of the line and 
of the Garde Mobile were handed over to the Germans, 
and the men themselves were regarded as prisoners of 
war. But the National Guard retained its weapons and 
cannon, and only entered into a truce with the conquerors. 
The latter did not venture upon a triumphal entry into 
Paris. Only a small portion of Paris, for the most part 
consisting of public parks, did they attempt to occupy, 
and even this only for a few days. And during the 
whole time they, who had kept Paris in a state of siege 
for 131 days, found themselves in their turn surrounded 
by armed Parisian workmen, who carefully watched lest 
any "Prussian" should overstep the narrow limits of the 
quarter reserved for the foreign conqueror. Such re- 
spect the Parisian workmen extorted from that army, 
before which all the armies of the Empire successively 
had laid down their weapons; and the Prussian Junkers, 
who had come thither in order to take revenge on the 
hotbed of revolution, were compelled to stand and defer- 
entially salute this very armed revolution. 

During the war the Parisian workmen had confined 
themselves to demanding the energetic continuance of the 
struggle. But now, peace having been established after 
the capitulation of Paris, Thiers, the new head of the 
Government, could not help seeing that the rule of the 
propertied classes — of the great landlords and capitalists 
— was in continual danger so long as the Parisian work- 
men retained their arms. His first work accordingly was 
the attempt to disarm them. On the 18th of March he 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 9 

sent some troops of the line with the order to steal the 
artillery belonging to the National Guard, which had 
been manufactured and paid for by public subscription 
during the siege of Paris. The attempt miscarried. 
Paris instantly rose in arms like one man, and war 
was declared between Paris and the French Government 
sitting at Versailles. On the 26th of March the Paris 
Commune was elected, and proclaimed on the 28th. The 
Central Committee of the National Guard, which had 
hitherto carried on the Government, decreed the abolition 
of the scandalous Parisian "guardians of morality," and 
then abdicated its functions into the hands of the Com- 
mune. On the 30th the Commune abolished the con- 
scription and the standing army, and declared the Na- 
tional Guard, to which all citizens capable of bearing 
arms were to belong, to be the only force with the right 
to bear arms; it remitted all rents of dwellings from 
October, 1870, to April, 1871, such rent as had already 
been paid to be deducted from future payments; and 
stopped all sales of pledges in the city's pawnshop. The 
same day the foreigners elected to the Commune were 
confirmed in their functions, since "the flag of the Com- 
mune is that of the Universal Republic.'' On the ist of 
April it was decided that the highest salary of a function- 
ary of the Commune, whether a member or otherwise, was 
not to exceed 6,000 francs ($1,200) a year. On the fol- 
lowing day was decreed the separation of Church and 
State, the abolition of all State payments for religious 
purposes, and the transformation of all ecclesiastical 
wealth into national property. As a consequence of this, 
all religious symbols, dogmas, prayers — in short, " all 
things appertaining to the sphere of the individual con- 
science " — were on the 8th of April ordered to be ban- 
ished from the schools, an order which was carried out as 



10 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

soon as possible. On the 5th, in retaliation for the daily 
murder of communards captured by the Versailles 
troops, there was enacted a decree for the arrest of hos- 
tages, but it was never carried out. On the 6th, the 
guillotine was fetched out by the 137th battalion of the 
National Guard, and publicly burnt amid loud popular 
applause. On the 12th, the Commune ordered the tri- 
umphal column on the Place Vendome, which had been 
constructed by Napoleon I. after the war of 1809 out of 
captured cannon, to be overthrown, as it was a symbol 
of chauvinism and mutual hatred among the nations. 
This was accomplished on the i6th of May. On 
the 1 6th of April, the Commune issued an order for 
a statistical account of all factories and workshops which 
had been closed by the employers; for the elaboration 
of plans for their management by the workingmen hith- 
erto engaged in them, who were to be formed into co- 
operative societies for the purpose; and, also, for the 
federation of these societies into one great coopera- 
tive organization. On the 20th, it abolished the night 
work of bakers, as also the register-offices for procuring 
employment, which, since the Second Empire, had been 
the monopoly of certain police-appointed scoundrels, 
exploiters of the worst kind. The matter was hence- 
forward placed in the hands of the mayoralties of the 
twenty arrondissements^ of Paris. On the 30th of April 
it decreed the abolition of pawnshops, as being incompati- 
ble with the right of workmen to their tools and to credit. 
On the 5th of May it ordered the destruction of the chapel 
erected in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI. 

1 Subdivisions, districts. Each arrondissement of the French capital has 
its own Mayor, subject, however, to the regulations and orders of the 
Municipal Council, which directs the general affairs of the whole city and, 
at the time here spoken of, was called the Commune. — Note to the Amer- 
ican Edition. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION n 

Thus, since the i8th of March, the class character of 
the Parisian movement, hitherto thrust into the back- 
ground by the struggle against the foreign invasion, came 
clearly and emphatically to the fore. As in the Com- 
mune there sat almost exclusively workmen, or the recog- 
nized representatives of workmen, its decisions naturally 
bore a distinctively proletarian character. It either de- 
creed reforms which the Republican bourgeoisie had 
omitted to carry out from pure cowardice, but which 
formed a necessary foundation for the free action of the 
working class, as, for instance, the carrying out of the 
principle that religion, as far as the State is concerned, 
is a purely private matter ; or it adopted measures directly 
in the interest of the working class, and in a few cases 
even cutting deeply into the life tissue of the old order 
of society. But in a besieged city all this could not be 
carried beyond the first stages of realization. And from 
the beginning of May onwards the struggle against the 
ever increasing masses of the army of the Versailles 
Government claimed exclusive attention and energy. 

On the 7th of April the Versaillese had seized the bridge 
over the Seine at Neuilly on the west side of Paris; on 
the other hand, on the nth, they were beaten back with 
much loss by General Eudes in an attack they made on 
the south side. Paris was continually bombarded by the 
very people who had stigmatized the bombardment of the 
same city by the Prussians as a sacrilegious outrage. 
These very people went on their knees to the Prussian 
Government to implore the speedy return of the French 
military prisoners taken at Sedan and Metz, who were to 
reconquer Paris for them. The gradual arrival of these 
troops gave a decisive superiority to the Versaillese from 
the beginning of May onward. This showed itself even 
as early as the 23d of April, when Thiers broke off the 



12 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

negotiations with the Commune respecting the latter's 
offer to exchange the Archbishop of Paris and a number 
of other priests retained in Paris as hostages, against 
Blanqui alone, who had been twice elected to the Com- 
mune, but who remained a prisoner at Clairvaux. It 
showed itself still more clearly in the altered language of 
Thiers ; hitherto hesitating and ambiguous, he now sud- 
denly became insulting, threatening, and brutal. On the 
south side the Versaillese took, on the 3d of May, the 
redoubt of Moulin Saquet; on the 9th, the fort of Issy 
reduced to a heap of ruins by the cannonade ; on the 14th, 
that of Vanves. On the west side they gradually ad- 
vanced, seizing the numerous buildings and villages which 
extended to the outer line of fortifications, up to the en- 
ceinte itself; on the 21st, they succeeded, owing to treach- 
ery and the carelessness of the National Guard posted at 
that point, in entering the city. The Prussians, who oc- 
cupied the northern and eastern forts, allowed the Ver- 
saillese to press forward into the territory in the north 
of the city, which the conditions of peace had closed to 
them, and thence to inaugurate a formidable attack over 
a long line, which the Parisians, believing them to be 
covered by the terms of the truce, had in consequence 
only weakly occupied. The result of this was that the 
resistance in the western parts of Paris, the wealthier 
parts of the city, was only feeble ; it became tougher and 
more severe as the attacking troops approached the east- 
ern half, the working class parts of the city. Only after 
an eight days' struggle did the last defenders of the 
Commune succumb on the heights of Belleville and Menil- 
montant. And now the murder of defenseless men, 
women, and children, which had raged the whole week 
through in ever-increasing proportions, reached its highest 
point! The breechloader no longer killed fast enough; 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION ^3 

the conquered were slaughtered in hundreds with the 
mitrailleuses ; " the wall of the Federals " in the Pere la 
Chaise cemetery, where the last massacre took place, 
remains to-day a dumb but eloquent witness to the frenzy 
of crime of which the governing classes are capable as 
soon as the proletariat dares to stand up for its rights. 
Then, as the slaughter of all was seen to be impossible, 
came the arrests en masse, the shooting down of arbitra- 
rily selected prisoners as victims for sacrifice, and the 
transference of the remainder into great camps, where 
they awaited the mercy of the courts-martial. The Prus- 
sian troops, who were encamped to the northeast of Paris, 
received the order to allow no fugitives to pass. Never- 
theless, the officers often shut their eyes when the sol- 
diers obeyed the call of humanity rather than that com- 
mand. Especially does the Saxon Army Corps deserve 
the credit of having acted very humanely and of having 
let through many whose character as combatants of the 
Commune was obvious. 

Looking back to-day, after twenty years, upon the acts 
and historical significance of the Paris Commune, it ap- 
pears to us that the information contained in the pages of 
the Civil War in France may usefully be supplemented 
here by some special considerations. 

The members of the Commune were divided into a ma- 
jority of Blanquists, who had also predominated in the 
central committee of the National Guard, and a minority, 
which consisted for the most part of members of the 
International Workingmen's Association, who were ad- 
herents of the Proudhonian School of Socialism. The 
great mass of the Blanquists at that time were socialists 
only because of their revolutionary proletarian instinct. 
A few only had attained to greater clearness of principle 



14 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

owing to Vaillant, who was acquainted with German 
scientific sociaUsm. Thus we can understand why, in ^ 
the economic field, many things were left undone 
which, according to our present conceptions, should 
have been done by the Commune. The most dif- 
ficult thing to understand is, indeed, the sacred respect 
with which the Commune reverently stopped before the 
portals of the Bank of France. - This was also a porten- 
tous political error. The Bank in the hands of the Com- 
mune — that was worth more than ten thousand hostages. 
It would have meant the pressure of the entire French 
bourgeoise upon the Versailles Government in the 
interest of peace with the Commune. But what is still 
more wonderful, is the number of correct things done 
by the Commune, in spite of its make-up of Blanquists 
and Proudhonists. Of course, the Proudhonists are re- 
sponsible for the economic decrees of the Commune, for 
those that are praiseworthy as well as for those that are 
not, while the Blanquists are responsible for the political 
acts of commission and omission. And in both cases 
the irony of history would have it — as is usual when 
doctrinaires take the helm of the State — that both the ones 
and the others did the reverse of that which the doctrines 
of their school prescribed.^ 

^ In the " Appendix " to his French edition of the papers published 
here in English, Charles Longuet takes exception to this statement of Engels 
concerning the composition of the Central Committee and the Commune. 
The fact is, however, that although Longuet can claim that he was a mem- 
ber of the Commune and might, therefore, be supposed to know whereof 
he speaks in this matter, Engels' view is absolutely correct. Longuet classi- 
fies men, as a statistical clerk might do, by the organizations to which they 
respectively happened to belong; whereas Engels judges of them, as a 
philosopher must do, by their actual spirit and tendencies. The revolu- 
tionary spirit that dominated the Commune was essentially "Blanquist"; 
while the prevailing economic notions, among the comparatively few who 
had any, were " Proudhonist." Of clear-minded, thorough " Collectivists " 
there was only a handful in the whole city of Pai-is. That with intellectual 
elements economically so weak, and under circumstances so unfavorable to 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 15 

Proudhon, the socialist of the small farmer and petty 
tradesman, hated association most heartily. According to 
him, it does more harm than good ; it is naturally unfruit- 
ful, even detrimental, because it curtails the worker's 
freedom ; it is pure dogma, unproductive and troublesome, 
destructive of the freedom of the worker as well as the 
saving of labor ; its disadvantages multiply faster than its 
advantages; while competition, division of labor, private 
property, are economic springs of greater power. Only in 
exceptional cases — these are Proudhon's own words — 
of great industries and great business corporations, the 
railroads, for insta'nce, is the association of the workers 
good and proper.^ 

And yet, even in Paris, the center of the artistic trades, 
production on a large scale had so far ceased to be an ex- 
ception in 1 87 1 that the most important decree of the 
'^Commune had for its object the organization of great 
industries and even of manufacture f and this organization 

the proper consideration of economic questions, the Commune should have 
done so well as to deserve the praise of Marx and Engels for such measures 
as it was able to take during its short life, is in itself an object lesson of 
the highest import. It shows in a vivid light the natural tendency of the 
proletarian mind when its class-consciousness is set in motion by a terrific 
class struggle. — Note to the American Edition. 

^ See Idee generale de la Revolution, 3 me etude. 

* This term, " manufacture," is a compound of two Latin words : manu, 
by hand, and factum, made. From the birth of the factory system the 
true meaning of this expression has been lost by the " vulgar bourgeois," 
who ignorantly applied it to all the products of industries carried on upon 
a large scale, without making in his terminology, as he surely did in his 
mercantile operations, the important discrimination between those that were 
still entirely or chiefly wrought out with hand tools by hand labor, and 
those that now were to any appreciable extent turned out by " labor-saving " 
machinery, moved by steam, water, or some other non-human power, and 
simply " tended " by mere " operatives," less paid than the " artizans," 
and fewer in number as compared with the amount of production. Nay, 
sometimes the sense adulteration went even farther. For instance, a cen- 
tury ago every shoe was hand-made, it was a " manufacture." To-day some 
shoes are still hand-made, and therefore are still truly "manufactures," 
while the great bulk of the shoe production is machinery-made and comes 
from " factories." Yet shoes of the latter sort are called " manufactures," 



1 6 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

tion was to comprise not only the association of the work- 
ers in each factory, but also the union of all these coopera- 
tive associations into one great federation : in short, 
an organization of such a character that, as Marx very 
correctly states in the Civil War, it must have ultimately 
ended in communism, that is, in the very opposite of the 
Proudhonistic theory. For this reason, the Commune 
was the grave of the Proudhonist School of Socialism. 
This school no longer exists among the French workers ; 
and among the Possibilists^ no less than among the 
Marxists, there now rules undisputedly the Marxian 
theory. To-day Proudhonists are found only among the 
" radical " bourgeoisie. 

The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the 
school of conspiracy, held together by the rigid discipline 
essential to it, they started from the conception that 
a comparatively small number of resolute, well organized 
men would be able not only to grasp the helm of State at 

while the former are not (except by the census-taker when this par- 
ticular class of footwear is turned out in custom shce-making establish- 
ments of some importance). Marx and Engels, however, never failed to 
put back on its feet what the " vulgar bourgeois " had turned upon its 
head. They restored in their works the correct sense of the expression, 
according to its derivation; and by the word "manufacture" is here 
meant the product of the large workshop in which the work is done by 
hand, as of old, but the modern characteristic of which is the division 
of labor. Let us also observe here that although the division of labor is 
in this case a mere administrative device, economic results are obtained 
from it that are similar to those which flow from the division of labor 
necessitated by the use of machinery: namely, greater efficiency of the 
worker in the particular branch of work especially assigned to him; in- 
crease of the intensity of his toil; decrease, however, of his general skill, 
and, consequently, " cheaper labor." — Note to the American Edition. 

^ The " Possibilists " were opportunists, who believed in working only 
for what they considered as "possible" or "practicable;" the "Marxists" 
are the great French Labor Party (Parti Ouvrier Frangais), a thoroughly 
socialist revolutionary organization. The acceptance of the Marxist theory 
by the Possibilists can refer only to the goal — the Socialist Commonwealth. 
Incorrigible arrivistes, they hastened into the camp of the Ministerialists, 
when Millerand accepted a portfolio in the Waldeck-Rousseau-Galliffet cabi- 
net. — Note to the American Edition. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 17 

a favorable moment, but also, through the display of 
great energy and reckless daring, to hold it as long as re- 
quired, that is, until they had succeeded in carrying the 
masses of the people into the revolutionary current and 
ranging them around the small leading band. To ac- 
complish this, what was necessary, above all else, was 
the most stringent, dictatorial centralization of all power 
in the hands of the new revolutionary government. And 
what did the Commune do, which in the majority con- 
sisted of these very Blanquists? In all its proclamations 
to the French people in the provinces, it called upon them 
for a free federation of all French communes with Paris, 
for a national organization, which for the first time was to 
be the real creation of the nation. The army, the political 
police, the bureaucracy, all those agencies of oppression in 
a centralized government, which Napoleon had created in 
1798, and which since then every new government had 
gladly used and kept up as ready weapons against its 
enemies, were to be abolished everywhere, as they had 
been abolished in Paris. 

From the very outset the Commune had to recognize 
that the working class, having once attained supremacy in 
the State, could not work with the old machinery of gov- 
ernment ; that this working class, if it was not to lose the 
position which it had just conquered, had, on the one hand, 
to abolish all the old machinery of oppression that had 
hitherto been utilized against itself, and, on the other 
hand, to secure itself against its own representatives and 
officers by declaring them to be removable, without ex- 
ception and at all times. In what did the chief charac- 
teristic of the old State consist? Society had created 
for itself definite organs, originally by simple division of 
labor, for the provision of its common interests. But 
these organs, at the head of which is the power of the 



x8 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

State, had in the course of time, and in the service of their 
own separate interests, transformed themselves from the 
servants of society into its masters. And this is true not 
only of the hereditary monarchy, but also of the demo- 
cratic republic. Nowhere do the "politicians" form a 
more distinct and more powerful subdivision of the na- 
tion than in the United States. /Here both the great 
parties, to which the predominance alternately falls, are 
in their turn ruled by people who make a business of 
politics, who speculate upon seats in the legislative bodies 
of the Union and the separate States, or who live by agita- 
tion for their party and are rewarded with offices after 
its victory. It is well known how the Americans have 
tried for thirty years past to throw off this yoke, which 
has become intolerable, and how, notwithstanding, they 
sink ever deeper into the mire of corruption. It is just 
in the United States that we can most clearly see the 
process through which the State acquires a position of in- 
dependent power over against the society, for which it 
was originally designed as a mere tool. There exists 
here no dynasty, no aristocracy, no standing army with 
the exception of a few men to guard against the Indians, 
no bureaucracy permanently installed and pensioned. 
Nevertheless, we have here two great rings of political 
speculators, that alternately take possession of the power 
of State and exploit it with the most corrupt means and 
to the most corrupt purposes. And the nation is power- 
less against these men, who nominally are its servants, 
but in reality are its two overruling and plundering hordes 
of politicians. 

Against this transformation of the State and the State's 
organs from the servants of society into its rulers — a 
transformation which has been inevitable in all hitherto 
existing States — the Commune adopted two unfailing 



INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 19 

remedies. In the first place it filled all positions of ad- 
ministration, justice, and instruction, through election by 
. universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject 
toTecall by their constituents. And secondly, it paid for 
all services, high or low, only the same pay that other 
workers received. The highest salary that it ever paid 
was six thousand francs. Thus a check was put to 
all place-hunting and career-making, even without the 
imperative mandate under which delegates to the repre- 
sentative bodies were placed, quite superfluously. 

This disruption of the power formerly possessed by the 
State, and its replacement by a new power that was truly 
democratic, is described in detail in the third chapter of 
the Civil War. But it was necessary to enter here once 
more upon some of its features, because in Germany the 
superstition concerning the State has been transmitted 
from philosophy into the general consciousness of the 
bourgeoisie, and even of many workers. According to 
the conception of philosophy, the State is the " realization 
of the Idea,^ or the philosophic equivalent of the Kingdom 
of God upon earth — the sphere in which eternal truth 
and righteousness are, or ought to be, realized. There fol- 
lows from this a superstitious reverence for the State 
and all its adjuncts, a superstition that is all the more 
natural, since from our very childhood we have grown 
up in the idea that the affairs and interests common to 
the whole of society could not be provided for in any 
other way than had been the practise hitherto, namely, 
through the State and its highly paid functionaries. 
And people imagine they have taken a very bold step, 
when they have once freed themselves from the be- 
lief in monarchy and swear now by the democratic re- 
public. But in reality the State is nothing else than a 
machine for the oppression of one class by another class, 



20 INTRODUCTION TO THE GERMAN EDITION 

and that no less so in the democratic repubhc than under 
the monarchy. At the very best it is an inheritance of evil, 
bound to be transmitted to the proletariat when it has 
become victorious in its struggle for class supremacy, 
and the worst features of which it will have to lop off at 
once, as the Commune did, until a new race, grown up 
under new, free social conditions, will be in a position to 
shake off from itself this State rubbish in its entirety. 

The German philistine has lately been thrown once 
again into wholesome paroxisms by the expression "dicta- 
torship of the proletariat." Well, gentle sirs, would you 
like to know how this dictatorship looks? Then look at 
the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the 
proletariat. 

Frederick Engels. 

London, on the 20th anniversary of the 
Commune, March 18, 1871. 



THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION 
ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 



THE DECLARATION OF WAR 
FIRST MANIFESTO OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL 

Issued on July 23, 1870, and addressed to the Members 

OF THE Association in Europe and 

the United States 



THE 

INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION 
ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 



THE DECLARATION OF WAR 

FIRST MANIFESTO OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL 

In the inaugural address of the International Work- 
ingmen's Association, of November, 1864, we said: "If 
the emancipation of the working classes requires their 
fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great 
mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal de- 
signs, playing upon national prejudices and squandering 
in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure?" We 
defined the foreign policy aimed at by the International 
in these words: "Vindicate the simple laws of morals 
and justice, which ought to govern the relations of pri- 
vate individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse 
of nations/' 

No wonder that Louis Bonaparte, who usurped his 
power by exploiting the war of classes in France, and 
perpetuated it by periodical wars abroad, should from the 
first have treated the International as a dangerous foe. 
On the eve of the plebiscite^ he ordered a raid on the mem- 

^ For several years before the Franco-Prussian war and the resulting fall 
of the Second Empire, the dissatisfaction of the bourgeoisie with the foreign 
and domestic policy of Louis Bonaparte had been steadily increasing, while 
the discontent of the workingmen was frequently manifesting itself in a way 
suggestive of impending revolution. He could not, of course, make a public 
admission of his growing unpopularity; but, fully realizing that unless he 
made " timely concessions " his rule would soon be imperilled, he concluded 

23 



/ 



24 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

bers of the administrative committees of the Interna- 
tional Workingmen's Association's throughout France, at 
Paris, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, Brest, etc., on the pre- 
text that the International was a secret society dabbling 
in a complot for his assassination, a pretext soon after ex- 
posed in its full absurdity by his own judges. What was 
the real crime of the French branches of the Interna- 
tional? They told the French people publicly and em- 
phatically that voting the plebiscite was voting despotism 
at home and war abroad.^ It has been, in fact, their work 

to act, mountebank-like, the part of a generous and liberal monarch. The 
French people, he said, rendered happy and wise under his reign, were at 
last fitted for greater freedom. He had, therefore, resolved to submit to a 
plebiscite — that is, to a general vote — such parliamentary reforms as he 
deemed adapted to the character and circumstances of the nation. This 
plebiscite, which was also intended to firmly establish his dynasty on the 
throne of France, took place in the midst of considerable excitement, height- 
ened by its fraudulent manipulation. Some time before, in wild fear of 
the International, he had caused sixty of its leading agitators to be arrested. 
But this act of despotism further inflamed the urban proletariat against 
him. In its vote on the plebiscite he could read his doom. Terror-stricken 
at the prospect of a revolution, he evoked the god of patriotism and declared 
war to Prussia. Johnson had the like of him in his mind's eye when he 
said that patriotism was the last resort of a scoundrel. — Note to the Amer- 
ican Edition. 

^ How the plebiscite was regarded by the French branches of the Inter- 
national is clearly set forth in the " Anti-Plebiscite Manifesto " issued jointly 
by the Paris Sections of that body and the Federal Chamber of Labor Socie- 
ties. (See Appendix, page 107.) The historic importance of this document 
may not fully appear, however, until it is contrasted with another anti- 
plebiscite manifesto, issued at the same time by Leon Gambetta, Emmanuel 
Arago, Jules Ferry, Jules Simon, and other political mouthpieces of the 
dissatisfied fraction of the French bourgeoisie. These bourgeois " repub- 
licans " were, not less than Xouis^^onaparte himself, apprehensive of the 
socialist movement, which men of their own kind and class had murderously 
stifled in 1848, but which the International was at last reviving despite all 
imperial obstacles and persecutions. In fact, they held the "personal gov- 
ernment of the Emperor " responsible for that revival, and they appealed 
" to the people " in the name of " social peace and order, which could only 
be secured by conciliating the interests and the classes." 

On the other hand, the Internationalists and their sympathizers in the 
labor societies had sufficiently learned the true meaning of the bourgeois 
expression " conciliation of the classes " to be no longer bamboozled by 
such logomachy; and they could see no greater virtue in the impersonal gov- 
ernment of a " peace-loving " bourgeoisie than in the personal government 



FIRST MANIFESTO 25 

that in all the great towns, in all the industrial centers of 
France, the working class rose like one man to reject the 
plebiscite. Unfortunately the balance was turned by the 
heavy ignorance of the rural districts. The stock ex- 
changes, the cabinets, the ruling classes and the press of 
Europe celebrated the plebiscite as a signal victory of the 
French Emperor over the French working class ; and it 
was the signal for the assassination, not of an individual, 
but of nations. 

,The war plot of July, 1870, is but an amended edition 
of the coup d'etat of December, 1851. At first view, the 
thing seemed so absurd that France would not believe in 
its real good earnest. It rather believed the deputy de- 
nouncing the ministerial war talk as a mere stock- jobbing 
trick. When, on July 15th, war was at last officially an- 
nounced to the Corps Legislatif, the whole Opposition 
refused to vote the preliminary subsidies — even Thiers 
branded it as "detestable"; all the independent journals 
of Paris condemned it, and, wonderful to relate, the 
provincial press joined in almost unanimously. 

Meanwhile, the Paris members of the International 

of a military despot. In other words, they understood the nature of the 
class struggle; hence the class character of their manifesto, which was 
obviously intended, not for " the people," so called in bourgeois parlance, 
but for the working people, " who alone are entitled to the esteem of their 
fellow citizens," and whose mission, as a body, " is to regenerate the world." 
Furthermore, it will be observed that while they made specific reference to 
a few only of the grievances and demands of the proletariat, they tersely 
summed up their whole programme in one brief and bold declaration, 
namely, that " the Socialist Republic is the only form of government 
through which the legitimate aspirations of the working class can be 
realized." 

Here, then, were two antagonistic classes, irreconcilable enemies, each 
working separately and in its own way for the downfall of Louis Bona- 
parte; one with a view to the establishment of a bourgeois republic (or, this 
failing, of a bourgeois parliamentary republic) ; the other looking to the 
initiation of the Socialist Republic. The lines were tightly drawn, and 
upon the fall of Bonaparte a great class conflict was inevitable. — Note to 
the American Edition. 



26 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

had again set to work. In the Reveil of July 12th, they 
published their manifesto "to the Workmen of all Na- 
tions," from which we extract the following few passages : 

" Once more," they say, " on the pretext of European 
equilibrium, of national honor, the peace of the world is 
menaced by political ambitions. French, German, Span- 
ish Workmen ! let our voices unite in one cry of reproba- 
tion against war! . . . War for a question of pre- 
ponderance or a dynasty, can, in the eyes of workmen, be 
nothing but a criminal absurdity. In answer to the war- 
like proclamations of those who exempt themselves from 
the blood-tax, and find in public misfortunes a source of 
fresh speculations, we protest, we who want peace, labor, 
and liberty ! . . . Brothers of Germany ! Our division 
would only result in the complete triumph of despotism 
on both sides of the Rhine. . . . Workmen of all 
countries ! Whatever may for the present become of our 
common efforts, we, the members of the International 
Workingmen's Association, who know of no frontiers, 
we send you, as a pledge of indissoluble solidarity, the 
good wishes and the salutations of the workmen of 
France." 

This manifesto of our Paris section was followed by 
numerous similar French addresses, of which we can here 
only quote the declaration of Neuilly-sur-Seine, pub- 
lished in the Marseillaise of July 22 : " The war, is it 
just? No! The war, is it national? No! It is merely 
Dynastic. In the name of humanity, of democracy, and 
the true interests of France, we adhere completely and en- 
ergetically to the protestation of the International against 
the war." 

These protestations expressed the true sentiments of the 
French working people, as was soon shown by a curious 
incident. The hand of the loth of December, first or- 



FIRST MANIFESTO 27 

ganized under the presidency of Louis Bonaparte, having 
been masqueraded into blouses and let loose on the streets 
of Paris, there to perform the contortions of war fever, 
the real workmen of the faubourgs came forward with 
public peace demonstrations so overwhelming that Pietri, 
the Prefect of Police, thought it prudent to at once stop 
all further street politics, on the plea that the feal Paris 
people had given sufficient vent to their pent-up patriot- 
ism and exuberant war enthusiasm.^ 

Whatever may be the incidents of Louis Bonaparte's 
war with Prussia, the death-knell of the Second Empire 
has already sounded at Paris. It will end, as it began, 
by a parody. But let us not forget that it is the Gov- 
ernments and the ruling classes of Europe who enabled 
Louis Bonaparte to play during eighteen years the fero- 
cious farce of the Restored Empire. 

On the German side, the war is a war of defense ; but 
who put Germany to the necessity of defending herself? 
Who enabled Louis Bonaparte to wage war upon her? 
Prussia! It was Bismarck who conspired with that very 
same Louis Bonaparte for the purpose of crushing popu- 
lar opposition at home, and annexing Germany to the 

^ Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I., was elected President of the 
Republic in 1849. On December 2, 1851, he made his infamous coup d'etat, 
preparatory to his assumption of imperial power. With this supreme end 
in view his police then organized " the band of the loth of December," 
which was recruited from the dregs in all ranks of society. The special 
work of these vile mercenaries, paid and later pensioned from the " secret 
funds," was to shout "Vive I'Empereur! " on the President's passage 
through the streets of Paris and on his travels throughout France, besides 
acting as spies and agents provocateurs, especially among the working people. 
As the press of the opposition had been suspended or muzzled, the demon- 
strations of the Decembriseurs were heralded everywhere by the subsidized 
papers as bona fide manifestations of popular enthusiasm for Louis Bona- 
parte, and of an irresistible desire in all classes for an imperial form of 
government. At the time here referred to by Marx, the Empire was already 
tottering, and the retired Decembriseurs had been called back on active duty. 
(See The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, by Karl Marx, translated 
by Daniel De Leon.) — Note to the American Edition, 



28 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

Hohenzollern dynasty. If the battle of Sadowa had been 
lost instead of being won, French battalions would have 
overrun Germany as the allies of Prussia. After her 
victory did Prussia dream one moment of opposing a free 
Germany to an enslaved France? Just the contrary. 
While carefully preserving all the native beauties of her 
old system, she superadded all the tricks of the Second 
Empire, its real despotism and its mock democratism, 
its political shams and its financial jobs, its high-flown 
talk and its low legerdemains. The Bonapartist regime, 
which till then only flourished on one side of the Rhine, 
had now got its counterfeit on the other. From such 
a state of things, what else could result but warf 

If the German working class allow the present war to 
lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into 
a war against the French people, victory or defeat will 
prove alike disastrous. All the miseries that befell Ger- 
many after her war of independence will revive with ac- 
cumulated intensity. 

The principles of the International are, however, too 
widely spread and too firmly rooted amongst the Ger- 
man working class to apprehend such a sad consumma- 
tion. The voices of the French workmen have reechoed 
from Germany. A mass meeting of workmen, held at 
Brunswick on July i6th, expressed its full concurrence 
with the Paris manifesto, spurned the idea of national 
antagonism to France, and wound up its resolutions with 
these words : " We are enemies of all wars, but above all 
of dynastic wars. . . . With deep sorrow and grief 
we are forced to undergo a defensive war as an unavoid- 
able evil ; but we call, at the same time, upon the whole 
German working class to render the recurrence of such 
an immense social misfortune impossible by vindicating 
for the peoples themselves the power to decide on peace 



FIRST MANIFESTO 29 

and war, and making them masters of their own desti- 



nies." 



At Chemnitz, a meeting of delegates, representing 
50,000 Saxon workmen, adopted unanimously a resolu- 
tion to this effect : " In the name of the German democ- 
racy, and especially of the workmen forming the Demo- 
cratic Socialist party, we declare the present war to be 

exclusively dynastic We are happy to grasp 

the fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of 
France. . . . Mindful of the watchword of the In- 
ternational Workingmen's Association: Proletarians of 
all countries unite, we shall never forget that the work- 
men of all countries are our friends and the despots of 
all countries our enemies." 

The Berlin branch of the International has also replied 
to the Paris manifesto : " We," they say, " join with heart 
and hand your protestation. . . . Solemnly we prom- 
ise that neither the sound of the trumpet, nor the roar of 
the cannon, neither victory nor defeat, shall divert us 
from our common work for the union of the children of 
toil of all countries." 
Be it so ! 

In the background of this suicidal strife looms the dark 
figure of Russia. It is an ominous sign that the signal 
for the present war should have been given at the moment 
when the Moscovite Government had just finished its 
strategic lines of railway and was already massing troops 
in the direction of the Pruth. Whatever sympathy the 
Germans may justly claim in a war of defense against 
Bonapartist aggression, they would forfeit at once by 
allowing the Prussian Government to call for, or accept 
the help of, the Cossack. Let them remember that, after 
their war of independence against the First Napoleon, Ger- 
many lay for generations prostrate at the feet of the Czar. 



30 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

The English working class stretch the hand of fellow- 
ship to the French and German working people. They 
feel deeply convinced that whatever turn the impending 
horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes 
of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact 
that while official France and Germany are rushing into 
a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany 
send each other messages of peace and good will; this 
great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens 
the vista of a brighter future. It proves that in contrast 
to old society, with its economic miseries, and its po- 
litical delirium, a new society is springing up, whose in- 
ternational rule will be Peace, because its national ruler 
will be everywhere the same — Labor! The Pioneer of 
that new society is the International Workingmen's Asso- 
ciation. 

London, July 23, 1870. 



THE INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION 
ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 



AFTER SEDAN 

SECOND MANIFESTO OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL 

Issued on September 9, 1870, and addressed to the 

Members of the Association in Europe 

AND the United States 



THE 

INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION 
ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 



AFTER SEDAN 

SECOND MANIFESTO OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL 

In our first manifesto of the 23d of July we said : 

" The death-knell of the Second Empire has already 
sounded at Paris. It will end, as it began, by a parody. 
But let us not forget that it is the governments and the 
ruling classes of Europe who enabled Louis Napoleon to 
play during eighteen years the ferocious farce of the Re- 
stored Empire." 

Thus, even before war operations had actually set in, 
we treated the Bonapartist bubble as a thing of the 
past. 

If we were not mistaken as to the vitality of the Sec- 
ond Empire, we were not wrong in our apprehension lest 
the German war should " lose its strictly defensive char- 
acter and degenerate into a war against the French 
people." The war of defense ended, in point of fact, 
with the surrender of Louis Bonaparte, the Sedan capitu- 
lation, and the proclamation of the Republic at Paris. 
But long before these events, the very moment that the 
utter rottenness of the Imperialist arms became evident, 
the Prussian military camarilla had resolved upon con- 
quest. There lay an ugly obstacle in their way — King 
William's own proclamations at the commencement of the 

33 



34 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

war. In his speech from the throne to the North Ger- 
man Diet, he had solemnly declared to make war upon 
the Emperor of the French, and not upon the French 
people. On the nth of August he had issued a mani- 
festo to the French nation, where he said : " The Emperor 
Napoleon having made, by land and sea, an attack on 
the German nation, which desired and still desires to live 
in peace with the French people, I have assumed the 
command of the German armies to repel his aggression, 
and I have been led by military events to cross the fron- 
tiers of France/' Not content to assert the defensive 
character of the war by the statement that he only 
assumed the command of the German armies " to repel 
aggression/' he added that he was only "led by military 
events" to cross the frontiers of France. A defensive 
war does, of course, not exclude offensive operations, 
dictated by "military events." 

Thus this pious king stood pledged before France and 
the world to a strictly defensive war. How to release 
him from his solemn pledge? The stage managers had 
to exhibit him as reluctantly yielding to the irresistible 
behest of the German nation. They at once gave the 
cue to the liberal German middle class, with its professors, 
its capitalists, its aldermen, and its penmen. That mid- 
dle class, which, in its struggles for civil liberty, had, 
from 1846 to 1870, been exhibiting an unexampled spec- 
tacle of irresolution, incapacity, and cowardice, felt, of 
course, highly delighted to bestride the European scene 
as the roaring lion of German patriotism. It revindi- 
cated its civic independence by affecting to force upon 
the Prussian Government the secret designs of that same 
Government. It does penance for its long-continued and 
almost religious faith in Louis Bonaparte's infallibility, 
by shouting for the dismemberment of the French Re- 



SECOND MANIFESTO 35 

public. Let us for a moment listen to the special plead- 
ings of those stout-hearted patriots ! 

They dare not pretend that the people of Alsace and 
Lorraine pant for the German embrace; quite the con- 
trary. To punish their French patriotism, Strasburg, a 
town with an independent citadel commanding it, has for 
six days been wantonly and fiendishly bombarded by 
^'German" explosive shells, setting it on fire, and killing 
great numbers of its defenseless inhabitants ! Yet, the 
soil of those provinces once upon a time belonged to the 
whilom German Empire. Hence, it seems, the soil and 
the human beings grown on it must be confiscated as im- 
prescriptible German property. If the map of Europe 
is to be remade in the antiquary's vein, let us by no means 
forget that the Elector of Brandenburg, for his Prussian 
dominions, was the vassal of the Polish Republic.^ 

1 In the old Germanic Empire, the Emperor was elected by a " college," 
originally composed of seven *' electors," three of whom were sovereign 
archbishops, and four were secular sovereigns. The number of the latter 
was subsequently increased to five by the elevation to the electorate of the 
Brandenburg principality, which in the course of time passed to the King of 
Prussia. This empire, which was practically a confederation of three 
hundred States under different rulers, lasted about nine hundred years; 
that is, from the beginning of the tenth century to the beginning of the 
nineteenth, when Napoleon I. abolished it and in its place formed under 
his own protectorate the Confederation of the Rhine, thereby severing 
Austria and Prussia from important German States upon which their in- 
fluence had previously extended. On the fall of Napoleon, the changes 
had been so great in the economic and political conditions of Germany that 
it was found impossible to reconstitute the Empire, and in 1815 a German 
Confederation was formed, with a " Diet " (or parliament) sitting at 
Frankfort. The number of States was then reduced to forty, and was 
subsequently brought down to thirty-five by the extinction of " families." 
In 1866, a war between Prussia and Austria resulted in the defeat of the 
latter and the formation of the North German Confederation under the 
lead of the former. Then came the war with France in 1870, in which the 
South German States hastened to iijake common cause with their Northern 
brothers. Finally, in January, 187 1, at Versailles, the new German Empire 
was proclaimed, with the King of Prussia as hereditary Emperor. The 
Empire is now composed of four kingdoms, six grand-duchies, five duchies, 
and seven principalities, besides the old free towns of Lubeck, Bremen, and 
Hamburg, and the conquered province of Alsace-Lorraine. There are two 



o 



6 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 



The more knowing patriots, however, require Alsace 
and the German-speaking part of Lorraine as a "material 
guarantee" against French aggression. As this con- 
temptible plea has bewildered many weak-minded people, 
we are bound to enter more fully upon it. 

There is no doubt that the general configuration of 
Alsace, as compared with the opposite bank of the Rhine, 
and the presence of a large fortified town like Strasburg, 
about halfway between Basle and Germersheim, very 
much favor a French invasion of South Germany, while 
they offer peculiar difficulties to an invasion of France 
from South Germany. There is, further, no doubt that 
the addition of Alsace and German-speaking Lorraine 
would give South Germany a much stronger frontier, in- 
asmuch as she would then be master of the crest of the 
Vosges mountains in its whole length, and of the for- 
tresses which cover its northern passes. If Metz were 
annexed as well, France would certainly for the moment 
be deprived of her two principal bases of operation 
against Germany, but that would not prevent her from 
constructing a fresh one at Nancy or Verdun. While 
Germany owns Coblentz, Mainz, Germersheim, Rastadt, 
and Ulm, all bases of operation against France, and plen- 
tifully made use of in this war, with what show^ of fair 
play can she begrudge France Strasburg and Metz, the 
only two fortresses of any importance she has on that 
side? Moreover, Strasburg endangers South Germany 
only while South Germany is a separate power from 
North Germany. From 1792 to 1795 South Germany 
was never invaded from that direction, because Prussia 
was a party to the war against the French Revolution ; 

legislative bodies in it; namely, the Bundesrath, or Federal Council, the 
members of which are appointed from the various States, and the Reichstag, 
or House of Representatives, the members of which are elected by universal 
suffrage. — Note to the American Edition, 



SECOND MANIFESTO 37 

but as soon as Prussia made a peace of her own in 1795 
and left the South to shift for itself, the invasions of 
South Germany, with Strasburg for a base, began and 
contmued till 1809. The fact is, a united Germany can 
always render Strasburg and any French army in Alsace 
innocuous by concentrating all her troops, as was done 
m the present war, between Saarlouis and Landau, and 
advancing, or accepting battle, on the line of road be- 
tween Mainz and Metz. While the mass of the German 
troops is stationed there, any French army advancing 
from Strasburg into South Germany would be outflanked, 
and have its communications threatened. If the present 
campaign has proved anything, it is the facility of in- 
vading France from Germany. 

But, in good faith, is it not altogether an absurdity 
and an anachronism to make military considerations the 
principle by which the boundaries of nations are to be 
fixed? If this rule were to prevail, Austria would still 
be entitled to Venetia and the line of the Mincio, and 
France to the line of the Rhine, in order to protect Paris, 
which lies certainly more open to an attack from the 
northeast than Berlin does from the southwest. If limits 
are to be fixed by military interests, there will be no end 
to claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty, 
and may be improved by annexing some more outlying 
territory; and, moreover, they can never be fixed finally 
and fairly, because they always must be imposed by the 
conqueror upon the conquered, and consequently carry 
within them the seed of fresh wars. 

Such is the lesson of all history. Thus with nations 
as with individuals. To deprive them of the power of of- 
fense, you must deprive them of the means of defense. 
You must not only garrote, but murder. If ever con- 
queror took "material guarantees" for breaking the sin- 



38 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

ews of a nation, the First Napoleon did so by the Tilsit 
treaty, and the way he executed it against Prussia and the 
rest of Germany. Yet, a few years later, his gigantic 
power split like a rotten reed upon the German people. 
What are the ''material guarantees" Prussia, in her wild- 
est dreams, can, or dare impose upon France, compared 
to the "material guarantees" the first Napoleon had 
wrenched from herself? The result will not prove the 
less disastrous. History will measure its retribution, 
not by the extent of the square miles conquered from 
France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in 
the second half of the 19th century, the policy of con- 
quest! 

But, say the mouthpieces of Teutonic patriotism, you 
must not confound Germans with Frenchmen. What we 
want is not glory, but safety. The Germans are an es- 
sentially peaceful people. In their sober guardianship, 
conquest itself changes from a condition of future war. 
into a pledge of perpetual peace. Of course, it is not 
Germans that invaded France in 1792, for the sublime pur- 
pose of bayoneting the revolution of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It is not Germans that befouled their hands by the 
subjugation of Italy, the oppression of Hungary, and the 
dismemberment of Poland. Their present military sys- 
tem, which divides the whole able-bodied male population 
into two parts — one standing army on service, and an- 
other standing army on furlough, both equally bound 
in passive obedience to rulers by divine right — such a 
military system is, of course, "a material guarantee" for 
keeping the peace, and the ultimate goal of civilizing ten- 
dencies ! In Germany, as everywhere else, the sycophants 
of the powers that be poison the popular mind by the 
incense of mendacious self-praise. 

Indignant as they pretend to be at the sight of French 



SECOND MANIFESTO 39 

fortresses in Metz and Strasburg, those German patriots 
see no harm in the vast system of Moscovite fortifications 
at Warsaw, Modlin, and Ivangorod. While gloating at 
the terrors of Imperialist invasion, they blink the in- 
famy of Autocratic tutelage. 

As in 1865 promises were exchanged between Louis 
Bonaparte and Bismarck, so in 1870 promises have been 
exchanged between Gortschakoff and Bismarck. As 
Louis Bonaparte flattered himself that the war of 1866, 
resulting in the common exhaustion of Austria and Prus- 
sia, would make him the supreme arbiter of Germany, 
so Alexander flattered himself that the war of 1870, re- 
sulting in the common exhaustion of Germany and 
France, would make him the supreme arbiter of the 
Western Continent. As the Second Empire thought the 
North German Confederation incompatible with its ex- 
istence, so autocratic Russia must think herself endan- 
gered by a German empire under Prussian leadership. 
Such is the law of the old political system. Within its 
pale the gain of one State is the loss of the other. The 
Czar's paramount influence over Europe roots in his tra- 
ditional hold on Germany. At a moment when in Russia 
herself volcanic social agencies threaten to shake the 
very base of autocracy, could the Czar afford to bear with 
such a loss of foreign prestige? Already the Moscovite 
journals repeat the language of the Bonapartist journals 
after the war of 1866. Do the Teuton patriots really be- 
lieve that liberty and peace will be guaranteed to Ger- 
many by forcing France into the arms of Russia? If the 
fortune of her arms, the arrogance of success, and dynas- 
tic intrigue lead Germany to a spoliation of French ter- 
ritory, there will then only remain two courses open to 
her. She must at all risks become the avowed tool of 
Russian aggrandizement, or, after some short respite, 



40 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

make again ready for another "defensive" war, not one 
of those new-fangled "locaHzed" wars, but a war of races 
— a war with the combined Sclavonian and Roman races. 

The German working class have resolutely supported 
the war, which it was not in their power to prevent, as a 
war for German independence and the liberation of 
France and Europe from that pestilential incubus, the 
Second Empire. It was the German workmen who, to- 
gether with the rural laborers, furnished the sinews and 
muscles of heroic hosts, leaving behind their half-starved 
families. Decimated by the battles abroad, they will be 
once more decimated by misery at home. In their turn 
they are now coming forward to ask for ''guarantees" — 
guarantees that their immense sacrifices have not been 
brought in vain, that they have conquered liberty, that 
the victory over the Imperialist armies will not, as in 
1815, be turned into the defeat of the German people; 
and, as the first of these guarantees, they claim an honor- 
able peace for France, and the recognition of the French 
Republic. 

The Central Committee of the German Socialist Demo- 
cratic Workmen's party issued, on the 5th of September, 
a manifesto, energetically insisting upon these guaran- 
tees. "We," they say, "we protest against the annexation 
of Alsace and Lorraine. And we are conscious of speak- 
ing in the name of the German working class. In the 
common interest of France and Germany, in the interest 
of peace and liberty, in the interest of Western civiliza- 
tion against Eastern barbarism, the German workmen 
will not patiently tolerate the annexation of Alsace and 
Lorraine. ... We shall faithfully stand by our fel- 
low-workmen in all countries for the common Interna- 
tional cause of the Proletariat!" 

Unfortunately, we cannot feel sanguine of their im- 



SECOND MANIFESTO 41 

mediate success. If the French workmen amidst peace 
failed to stop the aggressor, are the German workmen 
more likely to stop the victor amidst the clangor of arms? 
The German workmen's manifesto demands the extradi- 
tion of Louis Bonaparte as a common felon to the French 
Republic. Their rulers are, on the contrary, already try- 
ing hard to restore him to the Tuileries as the best man 
to ruin France. However that may be, history will prove 
that the German working class are not made of the same 
malleable stuff as the German middle class. They will 
do their duty. 

Like them, we hail the advent" of the Republic in 
France, but at the same time we labor under misgivings 
which we hope will prove groundless. That Republic has 
not subverted the throne, but only taken its place become 
vacant. It has been proclaimed, not as a social conquest, 
but as a national measure of defense. It is in the hands 
of a Provisional Government composed partly of noto- 
rious Orleanists, partly of middle-class Republicans, upon 
some of whom the insurrection of June, 1848, has left 
its indelible stigma.^ The division of labor amongst the 

1 On the 8th of September, 1870, two days after Napoleon III., beaten 
at bedan, had surrendered to the King of Prussia, the people of Paris 
assembled tumultuously in the streets, and the National Guard, armed with 
muskets, invaded the Corps Legislatif. All the deputies were expelled 
except those of the Left, who were carried off to the Hotel de ViUe, and 
who, then and there, in compliance with the imperious demands of a vast 
multitude, proclaimed the Republic. Then Jules Favre, Jules Simon, Jules 
i'erry, Gambetta, Cremieux, Emmanuel Arago, Glais-Bizoin, Pelletan, Gar- 
nier-Pages, and Picard, by mutual agreement proposed themselves' as a 
provisional Government of Defense. When their names were read by 
Favre, the crowd answered by adding those of well-known revolutionists, 
such as Delescluze and Blanqui; but Favre & Co. cunningly insisted upon 
ha\^ng no colleagues in the provisional government that were not deputies 
of Pans, and the crowd assented, satisfied with the addition of Rochefort. 
In Lissagaray's words: "This phrenzy of just emancipated serfs made the 
[bourgeois] Left masters. Twelve individuals took possession of France. 
They invoked no other title than their mandate as representatives of Paris, 
and declared themselves legitimate by popular acclamation."— iNTo^^ to the 
American Edition. 



42 THE INTERNATIONAL ON THE WAR 

members of that Government looks awkward. The Or- 
leanists have seized the strongholds of the army and the 
police, while to the professed Republicans have fallen the 
talking departments. Some of their first acts go far to 
show that they have inherited from the Empire, not only 
ruins, but also its dread of the working class. If eventual 
impossibilities are in wild phraseology promised in the 
name of the Republic, is it not with a view to prepare the 
cry for a "possible" government? Is the Republic, by 
some of its middle-class undertakers, not intended to 
serve as a mere stop-gap and bridge over an Orleanist 
Restoration ? 

The French working class moves, therefore, under cir- 
cumstances of extreme difficulty. Any attempt at up- 
setting the new Government in the present crisis, when 
the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would 
be a desperate folly. The French workmen must perform 
their duties as citizens ; but, at the same time, they must 
not allow themselves to be swayed by the national 
souvenirs of 1792, as the French peasants allowed them- 
selves to be deluded by the national souvenirs of the First 
Empire. They have not to recapitulate the past, but to 
build up the future. Let them calmly and resolutely im- 
prove the opportunities of Republican liberty, for the 
work of their own class organization. It will gift them 
with fresh Herculean powers for the regeneration of 
France, and our common task — the emancipation of labor. 
Upon their energies and wisdom hinges the fate of the 
Republic. 

The English workmen have already taken measures 
to overcome, by a wholesome pressure from without, the 
reluctance of their Government to recognize the French 
Republic. The present dilatoriness of the British Gov- 
ernment is probably intended to atone for the Anti- 



SECOND MANIFESTO 43 

Jacobin war and the former indecent haste in sanctioning 
the coup d'etat. The English workmen call also upon 
their Government to oppose by all its power the dismem- 
berment of France, which a part of the English press is 
shameless enough to howl for. It is the same press that 
for twenty years deified Louis Bonaparte as the provi- 
dence of Europe, that frantically cheered on the slave- 
holders to rebellion. Now, as then, it drudges for the 
slaveholder. 

Let the sections of the International WorUngmen's 
Association in every country stir the working classes to 
action. If they forsake their duty, if they remain passive, 
the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of 
still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation 
to a renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of 
the sword, of the soil, and of capital. 

Vive la Republique! 
London, September p, 1870. 



THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

MANIFESTO OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE 
INTERNATIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIA- 
TION ON THE PARIS COMMUNE 

Issued on May 30, 1871, and addressed to the Members of the 
Association in Europe and the United States 



THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 



CHAPTER I 

THE NATIONAL DEFENSE 

On the 4th of September, 1870, when the workingmen 
of Paris proclaimed the Republic, which was almost in- 
stantaneously acclaimed throughout France, without a 
single voice of dissent, a cabal of place-hunting barristers, 
with Thiers for their statesman and Trochu for their 
general, took hold of the Hotel de Ville. At that time 
they were imbued with so fanatical a faith in the mission 
of Paris to represent France in all epochs of historical 
crises, that, to legitimatize their usurped titles as gov- 
ernors of France, they thought it quite sufficient to pro- 
duce their lapsed mandates as representatives of Paris. 
In our second address on the late war, five days after 
the rise of these men, we told you who they were. Yet, 
in the turmoil of surprise, with the real leaders of the 
working class still shut up in Bonapartist prisons and the 
Prussians already marching upon Paris, Paris bore with 
their assumption of power, on the express condition that 
it was to be wielded for the single purpose of national 
defense. Paris, however, was not to be defended with- 
out arming its working class, organizing them into an 
effective force, and training their ranks by the war itself. 
But Paris armed was the Revolution armed. A victory 
of Paris over the Prussian aggressor would have been 

47 



48 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

a victory of the French workman over the French capi- 
taHst and his State parasites. In this confHct between 
national duty and class interest, the Government of Na- 
tional Defense did not hesitate one moment to turn into 
a Government of National Defection. 

The first step they took was to send Thiers on a roving 
tour to all the Courts of Europe, there to beg mediation 
by offering the barter of the Republic for a king. Four 
months after the commencement of the siege, when they 
thought the opportune moment had come for breaking 
the first word of capitulation, Trochu, in the presence 
of Jules Favre and others of his colleagues, addressed 
the assembled mayors of Paris in these terms : 

"The first question put to me by my colleagues on the 
very evening of the 4th of September was this : Paris, 
can it, with any chance of success stand a siege by the 
Prussian army? I did not hesitate to answer in the 
negative. Some of my colleagues here present will war- 
rant the truth of my words and the persistence of my 
opinion. I told them, in these very terms, that, under the 
existing state of things, the attempt of Paris to hold out 
a siege by the Prussian army would be folly. With- 
out doubt, I added, it would be an heroic folly, but that 

would be all The events [managed by 

himself] have not given the lie to my prevision." This 
nice little speech of Trochu was afterwards published 
by M. Corbon, one of the mayors present. 

Thus, on the very evening of the proclamation of the 
Republic, Trochu's "plan" was known to his colleagues 
to be the capitulation of Paris. If national defense had 
been more than a pretext for the personal government 
of Thiers, Favre & Co., the upstarts of the 4th of Sep- 
tember, would have abdicated on the 5th — would have 
initiated the Paris people into Trochu's "plan," and called 



THE NATIONAL DEFENSE 49 

Upon them to surrender at once, or to take their own 
fate into their own hands. Instead of this, the infamous 
impostors resolved upon curing the heroic folly of Paris 
by a regimen of famine and broken heads, and to dupe 
her in the meanwhile by ranting manifestoes, holding 
forth that Trochu, "the Governor of Paris, will never 
capitulate,'' and Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister, will 
"not cede an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our 
fortresses/' In a letter to Gambetta, that very same 
Jules Favre avows that what they were "defending" 
against were not the Prussian soldiers, but the working- 
men of Paris. During the whole continuance of the 
siege the Bonapartist cut-throats, whom Trochu had 
wisely intrusted with the command of the Paris army, 
exchanged, in their intimate correspondence, ribald jokes 
at the well-understood mockery of defense.^ The mask 
of imposture was at last dropped on the 28th of January, 
1871. With the true heroism of utter self-debasement, 
the Government of National Defense, in their capitula- 
tion, came out as the Government of France by Bis- 
marck's permissioui — a part so base that Louis Bonaparte 
himself had, at Sedan, shrunk from accepting it. After 
the events of the 18th of March, on their wild flight to 
Versailles, the capitulards left in the hands of Paris the 
documentary evidence of their treason, to destroy which, 
as the Commune says in its manifesto to the provinces, 
"those men would not recoil from battering Paris into a 
heap of ruins washed by a sea of blood." 

To be eagerly bent upon such a consummation, some 
of the leading members of the Government of Defense 
had, besides, most peculiar reasons of their own. 

* See, for instance, the correspondence of Alphonse Simon Guiod, supreme 
commander of the artillery of the Army of Defense of Paris and Grand 
Cross of the Legion of Honor, to Suzanne, general of division of artillery, 
a correspondence published by the Journal Officiel of the Commune. 



50 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Mil- 
liere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National 
Assembly, now shot by express order of Jules Favre, 
published a series of authentic legal documents in proof 
that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of 
a drunkard resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring 
concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, con- 
trived to grasp in the name of the children of his adul- 
tery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and 
that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he 
only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bona- 
partist tribunals. As these dry legal documents were 
not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse- 
power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his 
tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, 
in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of 
Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against 
family, religion, order, and property. This same forger 
had hardly got into power, after the 4th of September, 
when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and 
Taillefer, convicted, even under the Empire, of forgery, 
in the scandalous affair of the Etendard. One of 
these men, Taillefer, having dared to return to Paris 
under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; 
and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the 
National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her 
jailbirds ! 

Ernest Picard, the Joe Miller of the Government of 
National Defense, who appointed himself Home Minister 
of the Republic after having in vain striven to become 
the Home Minister of the Empire, is the brother of one 
Arthur Picard, an individual expelled from the Paris 
'Bourse as a blackleg,^ and convicted, on his own con- 

^ See report of the Prefecture of Police, dated July 13th, 1867. 



THE NATIONAL DEFENSE 51 

fession, of a theft of 300,000 francs, while manager of 
one of the branches of the Societe Generale, rue Palestro, 
No. 5.1 This Arthur Picard was made by Ernest Picard 
the editor of his paper, rElecteur Libre. While the com- 
mon run of stockjobbers were led astray by the official 
lies of the Home Office paper, Arthur was running back- 
wards and forwards between the Home Office and the 
Bourse, there to discount the disasters of the French 
army. The whole financial correspondence of that 
worthy pair of brothers fell into the hands of the Com- 
mune. 

Jules Ferry, a penniless barrister before the 4th of Sep- 
tember, contrived, as the mayor of Paris during the siege, 
to job a fortune out of famine. The day on which he 
would have to give an account of his maladministration 
would be the day of his conviction. 

These men, then, could find, in the ruins of Paris only, 
their tickets-of-leave : they were the very men Bismarck 
wanted. With the help of some shuffling of cards, 
Thiers, hitherto the secret prompter of the Government, 
now appeared at its head, with the ticket-of-leave men for 
his Ministers. 

Thiers, that monstrous gnome, has charmed the French 
bourgeoisie for almost half a century, because he is the 
most consummate intellectual expression of their own 
class-corruption. Before he became a statesman he had 
already proved his lying powers as an historian. The 
chronicle of his public life is the record of the misfor- 
tunes of France. Banded, before 1830, with the Repub- 
licans, he slipped into office under Louis Philippe by be- 
traying his protector Lafitte, ingratiating himself with the 
king by exciting mob-riots against the clergy, during 
which the Church of Saint Germain TAuxerrois and the 

* See report of the Prefecture of Police, dated December nth, 1868. 



52 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

Archbishop's palace were plundered, and by acting the 
minister-spy upon, and the jail-accoucheur of, the Duchess 
de Berri. The massacre of the Republicans in the rue 
Transnonain, and the subsequent infamous laws of Sep- 
tember against the press and the right of association, were 
his work. Reappearing as the chief of the Cabinet in 
March, 1840, he astonished France with his plan of forti- 
fying Paris. To the Republicans, who denounced this 
plan as a sinister plot against the liberty of Paris, he re- 
plied from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies : 

"What ! to fancy that any works of fortification could 
ever endanger liberty! And first of all you calumniate 
any possible Government in supposing that it could some 
day attempt to maintain itself by bombarding the capital. 
. . . But that Government would be a hundred times 
more impossible after its victory than before." Indeed, 
no Government would ever have dared to bombard Paris 
from the forts, but that Government which had previously 
surrendered these forts to the Prussians. 

When King Bomba^ tried his hand at Palermo, in Jan- 
uary, 1848, Thiers, then long since out of office, again 
rose in the Chamber of Deputies : "You know, gentlemen, 
what is happening at Palermo. You, all of you, shake 
with horror [in the parliamentary sense] on hearing that 
during forty-eight hours a large town has been bombarded 
— ^by whom? Was it by a foreign enemy exercising the 
rights of war? No, gentlemen, it was by its own Gov- 
ernment. And why ? Because that unfortunate town de- 
manded its rights. Well, then, for the demand of its 
rights it has got forty-eight hours of bombardment. . . 
. . Allow me to appeal to the opinion of Europe. It is 

^ Ferdinand, King of Naples, nicknamed " Bomba " (bomb), because of 
the barbarous bombardment of Palermo to which reference is made here. 

— Note to the American Edition. 



THE NATIONAL DEFENSE 53 

doing a service to mankind to arise, and to speak out 
from this tribune— the greatest, perhaps, in Europe- 
some resounding words [mere words, indeed] of indig- 
nation against such acts. . . . When the Regent 
Espartero, who had rendered services to his country 
[which M. Thiers never did], intended bombarding Bar- 
celona, in order to suppress its insurrection, there arose 
from all parts of the world a general outcry of 
indignation." 

Eighteen months afterwards, M. Thiers was amongst 
the fiercest defenders of the bombardment of Rome by a 
French army. In fact, the fault of King Bomba seems 
to have consisted in this only, that he limited his bom- 
bardment to forty-eight hours. 

A few days before the Revolution of February, fretting 
at the long exile from place and pelf to which Guizot had 
condemned him, and sniffing in the air the scent of an 
approaching popular commotion, Thiers, in that pseudo- 
heroic style which won him the nickname of Mirabeau- 
mouche, declared to the Chamber of Deputies : "I am of 
the party of Revolution, not only in France, but in Europe. 
I wish the government of the Revolution to remain in the 
hands of moderate men .... but if that govern- 
ment should fall into the hands of ardent minds, even into 
those of Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. 
I shall always be of the party of the Revolution." The 
Revolution of February came. Instead of displacing the 
Guizot Cabinet by the Thiers Cabinet, as the little man 
had dreamt, it superseded Louis Philippe by the Re- 
public. On the first day of the popular victory he care- 
fully hid himself, forgetting that the contempt of the 
workingmen screened him from their hatred. Still, with 
his legendary courage, he continued to shy the public 
stage, until the June massacre had cleared it for his sort 



54 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

of action. Then he became the leading mind of the 
'Tarty of Order" and its ParUamentary RepubHc, that 
anonymous interregnum, in which all the rival factions 
of the ruling class conspired together to crush the peo- 
ple, and conspired against each other to restore each of 
them its own monarchy. Then, as now, Thiers de- 
nounced the Republicans as the only obstacle to the con- 
solidation of the Republic ; then, as now, he spoke to the 
Republic as the hangman spoke to Don Carlos : ''I shall 
assassinate thee, but for thine own good." Now, as then, 
he will have to exclaim on the day after his victory: 
U Empire est fait — the Empire is consummated. Despite 
his hypocritical homilies about necessary liberties and his 
personal grudge against Louis Bonaparte, who had made 
a dupe of him and kicked out parliamentarism — and out- 
side of its factitious atmosphere the little man is con- 
scious of withering into nothingness- — he had a hand in 
all the infamies of the Second Empire, from the occupa- 
tion of Rome by French troops to the war with Prussia ; a 
war which he incited by his fierce invective against Ger- 
man unity, not as a cloak of Prussian despotism, but as an 
encroachment upon the vested right of France in Ger- 
man disunion. Fond of brandishing, with his dwarfish 
arms, in the face of Europe the sword of the First Na- 
poleon, whose historical shoeblack he had become, his 
foreign policy always culminated in the utter humilia- 
tion of France, from the London convention of 1841 to 
the Paris capitulation of 1871, and the present civil war, 
when he hounds on the prisoners of Sedan and Metz 
against Paris by special permission of Bismarck. Despite 
his versatility of talent and shiftiness of purpose, this 
man has his whole lifetime been wedded to the most fos- 
sil routine. It is self-evident that to him the deeper un- 
dercurrents of modern society remained forever hidden; 



THE NATIONAL DEFENSE 55 

but even the most palpable changes on its surface were 
abhorrent to a brain all the vitality of which had fled to 
the tongue. Thus he never tired of denouncing as a sac- 
rilege any deviation from the old French protective sys- 
tem. When a minister of Louis Philippe, he railed at 
railways as a wild chimera ; and when in opposition under 
Louis Bonaparte, he branded as a profanation every at- 
tempt to reform the rotten French army system. Never 
in his long political career has he been guilty of a 
single — even the smallest — measure of any practical 
use. 

Thiers was consistent only in his greed for wealth and 
his hatred of the men that produce it. Having entered 
his first ministry under Louis Philippe poor as Job, he 
left it a millionaire. His last ministry under the same 
king (of the ist of March, 1840), exposed him to pub- 
lic taunts of peculation in the Chamber of Deputies, to 
which he was content to reply by tears — a commodity 
he deals in as freely as Jules Favre, or any other croco- 
dile. At Bordeaux his first measure for saving France 
from impending financial ruin was to endow himself with 
three millions a year, the first and the last word of the 
"Economical Republic," the vista of which he had opened 
to his Paris electors in 1869. One of his former col- 
leagues of the Chamber of Deputies of 1830, himself a 
capitalist and, nevertheless, a devoted member of the 
Paris Commune, M. Beslay, lately addressed Thiers thus 
in a public placard : "The enslavement of labor by capital 
has always been the cornerstone of your policy, and from 
the very day you saw the Republic of Labor installed at 
the Hotel de Ville, you have never ceased to cry out to 
France : These are criminals !* " A master in small 
state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a crafts- 
man in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and 



56 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

base perfidies of parliamentary party- warfare ; never 
scrupling, when out of office, to fan a revolution, and 
to stifle it in blood when at the helm of the State; with 
class prejudices standing him in the place of ideas, and 
vanity in the place of a heart ; his private life as infamous 
as his public life is odious — even now, when playing the 
part of a French Sulla, he cannot help setting off the 
abomination of his deeds by the ridicule of his ostenta- 
tion. 

The capitulation of Paris, by surrendering to Prussia 
not only Paris, but all France, closed the long-continued 
intrigues of treason with the enemy, which the usurpers 
of the 4th of September had begun, as Trochu himself 
said, on that very same day. On the other hand, it in- 
itiated the civil war they were now to wage with the 
assistance of Prussia, against the Republic and Paris. 
The trap was laid in the very terms of the capitulation. 
At that time above one-third of the territory was in the 
hands of the enemy, the capital was cut off from the 
provinces, all communications were disorganized. To 
elect under such circumstances a real representation of 
France was impossible, unless ample time were given for 
preparation. In view of this, the capitulation stipulated 
that a National Assembly must be elected within eight 
days; so that in many parts of France the news of the 
impending election arrived on its eve only. This Assem- 
bly, moreover, was, by an express clause of the capitu- 
lation, to be elected for the sole purpose of deciding on 
peace or war, and, eventually, to conclude a treaty of 
peace. The population could not but feel that the terms 
of the armistice rendered the continuation of the war im- 
possible, and that for sanctioning the peace imposed by 
Bismarck, the worst men in France were the best. But 
not content with these precautions, Thiers, even before 



THE NATIONAL DEFENSE 57 

the secret of the armistice had been broached to Paris, 
set out for an electioneering tour through the provinces, 
there to galvanize back into life the Legitimist party, 
which now, along with the Orleanists, had to take the 
place of the then impossible Bonapartists. He was not 
afraid of them. Impossible as a government of modern 
France, and, therefore, contemptible as rivals, what party 
were more eligible as tools of counter-revolution than 
the party whose action, in the words of Thiers himself 
(Chamber of Deputies, January 5, 1833), "had always 
been confined to the three resources of foreign invasion, 
civil war, and anarchy"? They verily believed in the 
advent of their long-expected retrospective millennium. 
There were the heels of foreign invasion trampling upon 
France; there was the downfall of an Empire, and the 
captivity of a Bonaparte; and there they were them- 
selves. The wheel of history has evidently rolled back 
to stop at the Chamhre introuvahle of 18 16. In the 
assemblies of the Republic, 1848 to '51, they had been 
represented by their educated and trained parliamentary 
champions; it was the rank-and-file of the party which 
now rushed in — all" the Pourceaugnacs^ of France. 

As soon as this Assembly of "Rurals" had met at Bor- 
deaux, Thiers made it clear to them that the peace pre- 
liminaries must be assented to at once, without even the 
honors of a parliamentary debate, as the only condi- 
tion on which Prussia would permit them to open the 
war against the Republic and Paris, its stronghold. The 
counter-revolution had, in fact, no time to lose. The 
Second Empire had more than doubled the national debt 
and plunged all the large towns into heavy municipal 

^ The Pourceaugnacs are an ideal creation that typifies the country 
nobility, Pourceau meaning swine, and gnac being a suffix common to a 
number of noble names in the southern part of France; for instance, 
Polignac, Cavaignac, Cassagnac, etc. — Note to the American Edition. 



5^ THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

debts. The war had fearfully swelled the liabilities, and 
mercilessly ravaged the resources of the nation. To com- 
plete the ruin, the Prussian Shylock was there with his 
bond for the keep of half a million of his soldiers on 
French soil, his indemnity of five milliards and interest 
at 5 per cent, on the unpaid instalments thereof. Who 
was to pay the bill? It was only by the violent over- 
throw of the Republic that the appropriators of wealth 
could hope to shift on to the shoulders of its producers 
the cost of a war which they, the appropriators, had them- 
selves originated. Thus, the immense ruin of France 
spurred on these patriotic representatives of land and 
capital, under the very eyes and patronage of the invader, 
to graft upon the foreign war a civil war — a slaveholders' 
rebellion. 

There stood in the way of this conspiracy one great 
obstacle — Paris. To disarm Paris was the first condi- 
tion of success. Paris was therefore summoned by 
Thiers to surrender its arms. Then Paris was exas- 
perated by the frantic anti-republican demonstrations of 
the "Rural" Assembly and by Thiers' own equivocations 
about the legal status of the Republic; by the threat to 
decapitate and decapitalize Paris ; the appointment of 
Orleanist ambassadors ; Duf aure's laws on over-due com- 
mercial bills and house rents, inflicting ruin on the 
commerce and industry of Paris; Pouyer-Quertier's tax 
of two centimes upon every copy of every imaginable 
publication; the sentences of death against Blanqui and 
Flourens; the suppression of the Republican journals; 
the transfer of the National Assembly to Versailles ; the 
renewal of the state of siege declared by Palikao, and ex- 
pired on the 4th of September ; the appointment of Vinoy, 
the Decemhriseur, as governor of Paris — of Valentin, the 
Imperialist gendarme, as its prefect of police — and of 



THE NATIONAL DEFENSE 59 

D'Aurelles de Paladine, the Jesuit general, as the com- 
mander-in-chief of its National Guard. 

And now we have to address a question to M. Thiers 
and the men of national defense, his understrappers. It 
is known that, through the agency of M. Pouyer-Quer- 
tier, his finance minister, Thiers had contracted a loan 
of two milliards, to be paid down at once. Now, is it 
true or not — 

1. That the business was so managed that a considera- 
tion of several millions was secured for the private bene- 
fit of Thiers, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, Pouyer-Quer- 
tier, and Jules Simon? and— 

2. That no money was to be paid down until after the 
"pacification" of Paris ? 

At all events, there must have been something very 
pressing in the matter, for Thiers and Jules Favre, in the 
name of the majority of the Bordeaux Assembly, un- 
blushingly solicited the immediate occupation of Paris 
by Prussian troops. Such, however, was not the game of 
Bismarck, as he sneeringly, and in public, told the ad- 
miring Frankfort Philistines on his return to Germany.^ 

1 The four paragraphs at the end of this chapter are omitted from Lon- 
guet s French edition, to which reference is made in our Preface. Longuet 
gives no reason for this suppression. It will be observed that the charges 
of corruption which were then currently made against Thiers, Favre and 
others, are presented here, not in the positive but in the interrogative form 
buch charges cannot be readily proved; yet every one knows that it would 
have been contrary to all the principles of morality by which the relations 
Of financiers and statesmen of France were determined in those days, for 
the financiers who made such an enormously profitable operation to offer 
no reward and for the statesman to refuse any.— Note to the American 



CHAPTER II 

THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH 

Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle in the way 
of counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Paris was, there- 
fore, to be disarmed. On this point the Bordeaux Assem- 
bly was sincerity itself. If the roaring rant of its Rurals 
had not been audible enough, the surrender of Paris by 
Thiers to the tender mercies of the triumvirate of Vinoy 
the Decemhriseur, Valentin the Bonapartist gendarme, 
and Aurelles de Paladine the Jesuit general, would have 
cut off even the last subterfuge of doubt. But while in- 
sultingly exhibiting the true purpose of the disarmament 
of Paris, the conspirators asked her to lay down her arms 
on a pretext which was the most glaring, the most bare- 
faced of lies. The artillery of the Paris National Guard, 
said Thiers, belonged to the State, and to the State it 
must be returned. The fact is this : From the very day 
of the capitulation, by which Bismarck's prisoners had 
signed the surrender of France, but reserved to them- 
selves a numerous bodyguard for the express purpose 
of cowing Paris, Paris stood on the watch. The Na- 
tional Guard reorganized themselves and intrusted their 
supreme control to a Central Committee elected by their 
whole body, save some fragments of the old Bonapartist 
formation. On the eve of the entrance of the Prussians 
into Paris, the Central Corrimittee took measures for the 
removal to Montmartre, Belleville, and La Villette of the 
cannon and mitrailleuses treacherously abandoned by the 
capitulards in and about the very quarters the Prussians 

60 



THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH 6i 

were to occupy. That artillery had been furnished by the 
subscriptions of the National Guard. As their private 
property, it was officially recognized in the capitulation 
of the 28th of January, and on that very title exempted 
from the general surrender, into the hands of the con- 
queror, of arms belonging to the Government. And 
Thiers was so utterly destitute of even the flimsiest pre- 
text for initiating the war against Paris, that he had to 
resort to the flagrant lie of the artillery of the National 
Guard being State property! 

The seizure of her artillery was evidently but to serve 
as the preliminary to the general disarmament of Paris, 
and, therefore, of the Revolution of the 4th of September. 
But that revolution had become the legal status of 
France. The Republic, its work, was recognized by the 
conqueror in the terms of the capitulation. After the 
capitulation, it was acknowledged by all the foreign 
Powers, and in its name the National Assembly had been 
summoned. The Paris workingmen's revolution of the 
4th of September was the only legal title of the National 
Assembly seated at Bordeaux, and of its executive. 
Without it, the National Assembly would at once have 
to give way to the Corps Legislatif, elected in 1869 by 
universal suffrage under French, not under Prussian, 
rule, and forcibly dispersed by the arm of the Revolution. 
Thiers and his ticket-of-leave men would have had to 
capitulate for safe-conducts signed by Louis Bonaparte, 
to save them from a voyage to Cayenne.. The National 
Assembly, with its power of attorney to settle the terms 
of peace with Prussia, was but an incident of that revo- 
lution, the true embodiment of which was still armed 
Paris, who had initiated it, undergone for it a five 
months' siege, with its horrors of famine, and made her 
prolonged resistance, despite Trochu's plan, the basis of 



62 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

an obstinate war of defense in the provinces. And Paris 
was now either to lay down her arms at the insuhing 
behest of the rebelhous slaveholders of Bordeaux, and 
acknowledge that her revolution of the 4th of Septem- 
ber meant nothing but a simple transfer of power from 
Louis Bonaparte to his royal rivals; or she had to stand 
forward as the self-sacrificing champion of France, whose 
salvation from ruin, and whose regeneration were im- 
possible, without the revolutionary overthrow of the po- 
litical and social conditions that had engendered the Sec- 
ond Empire, and, under its fostering care, matured into 
utter rottenness. Paris, emaciated by a five months' 
famine, did not hesitate one moment. She heroically re- 
solved to run all the hazards of a resistance against the 
French conspirators, even with Prussian cannon frown- 
ing upon her from her own forts. Still, in its abhorrence 
of the civil war into which Paris was to be goaded, the 
Central Committee continued to persist in a merely de- 
fensive attitude, despite the provocations of the Assem- 
bly, the usurpations of the Executive, and the menacing 
concentration of troops in and around Paris. 

Thiers opened the civil war by sending Vinoy, at the 
head of a multitude of sergents-de-ville and some regi- 
ments of the line, upon a nocturnal expedition against 
Montmartre, there to seize, by surprise, the artillery of 
the National Guard. It is well known how this attempt 
broke down before the resistance of the National Guard 
and the fraternization of the line with the people. D'Au- 
relles de Paladine had printed beforehand his bulletin of 
victory, and Thiers held ready the placards announcing 
his measures of coup d'etat. Now these had to be re- 
placed by Thiers' appeals, imparting his magnanimous 
resolve to leave the National Guard in the possession of 
their arms, with which, he said, he felt sure they would 



THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH (>3 

rally round the Government against the rebels. Out of 
300,000 National Guards only 300 responded to this sum- 
mons to rally round little Thiers against themselves. 
The glorious workingmen's revolution of the i8th of 
March took undisputed sway of Paris without striking 
a blow. The Central Committee was its provisional gov- 
ernment. Europe seemed, for a moment, to doubt whether 
the recent sensational performances of state and war had 
any reality in them, or whether they were the dreams 
of a long bygone past. 

From the i8th of March to the entrance of the Ver- 
sailles troops into Paris, the proletarian ^evolution re- 
mained so free from the acts of violence in which the 
revolutions, and still more the counter-revolutions, of the 
''better classes" abound, that no facts were left to its op- 
ponents to cry out about but the execution of Generals 
Lecomte and Clement Thomas, and the affair of the 
Place Vendome. 

One of the Bonapartist officers engaged in the noc- 
turnal attempt against Montmartre, General Lecomte, had 
four times ordered the 8ist line regiment to fire at an 
unarmed gathering in the Place Pigale, and on their re- 
fusal fiercely insulted them. Instead of shooting women 
and children, his own men shot him. The inveterate 
habits acquired by the soldiery under the training of the 
enemies of the working class are, of course, not likely 
to change the very moment these soldiers change sides. 
The same men executed Clement Thomas. 

"General" Clement Thomas, a malcontent ex-quarter- 
master-sergeant, had, in the latter days of Louis Phi- 
lippe's reign, enlisted at the office of the Republican news- 
paper Le National, there to serve in the double capacity 
of responsible man-of-straw (gerant responsable) and of 
duelling bully to that very combative journal. After the 



64 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

revolution of February, the men of Le National having 
got into power, they metamorphosed this old quarter- 
master-sergeant into a general on the eve of the butchery 
of June, of which he, like Jules Favre, was one of the 
sinister plotters, and became one of the most dastardly 
executioners. Then he and his generalship disappeared 
for a long time, to again rise to the surface on the ist of 
November, 1870. The day before, the Government of 
Defense, caught at the Hotel de Ville, had solemnly 
pledged their parole to Blanqui, Flourens, and other 
representatives of the working class, to abdicate their 
usurped power into the hands of a commune to be freely 
elected by Paris. Instead of keeping their word, they 
let loose on Paris the Bretons of Trochu, who now re- 
placed the Corsicans of Bonaparte. General Tamisier 
alone, refusing to sully his name by such a breach of faith, 
resigned the commandership-in-chief of the National 
Guard, and in his place Clement Thomas for once be- 
came again a general. During the whole of his tenure of 
command, he made war, not upon the Prussians, but upon 
the Paris National Guard. He prevented their general 
armament, pitted the bourgeois battalions against the 
workingmen's battalions, weeded out the officers hostile 
to Trochu's "plan," and disbanded, under the stigma of 
cowardice, the very same proletarian battalions whose 
heroism has now astonished their most inveterate enemies. 
Clement Thomas felt quite proud of having reconquered 
his June preeminence as the personal enemy of the work- 
ing class of Paris. Only a few days before the i8th of 
March, he laid before the War Minister, Leflo, a plan 
of his own for "finishing off la fine fleur (the cream) of 
the Paris canaille." After Vinoy's rout, he must needs 
appear upon the scene of action in the quality of an 
amateur spy. The Central Committee and the Paris 



THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH 65 

workingmen were as much responsible for the kilHng of 
Clement Thomas and Lecomte as the Princess of Wales 
was for the fate of the people crushed to death on the 
day of her entrance into London. 

The massacre of unarmed citizens in the Place Ven- 
dome is a myth which M. Thiers and the Rurals persist- 
ently ignored in the Assembly, entrusting its propagation 
exclusively to the servants' hall of European journalism. 
"The men of order," the reactionists of Paris, trembled 
at the victory of the i8th of March. To them it was the 
signal of popular retribution at last arriving. The ghosts 
of the victims assassinated at their hands from the days 
of June, 1848, down to the 226. of January, 1871, arose 
before their faces. Their panic was their only punish- 
ment. Even the sergents-de-ville, instead of being dis- 
armed and locked up, as ought to have been done, had 
the gates of Paris flung wide open for their safe retreat 
to Versailles. The men of order were left not only un- 
harmed, but allowed to rally and quietly to seize more 
than one stronghold in the very center of Paris. This 
indulgence of the Central Committee — ^this magnanimity 
of the armed workingmen — so strangely at variance with 
the habits of the "party of order," the latter misinter- 
preted as mere symptoms of conscious weakness. Hence 
their silly plan to try, under the cloak of an unarmed 
demonstration, what Vinoy had failed to perform with 
his cannon and mitrailleuses. On the 226. of March a 
riotous mob of swells started from the quarters of lux- 
ury, all the petits creves in their ranks, and at their head 
the notorious familiars of the Empire — the Heeckeren, 
Coetlogon, Henri de Pene, etc. Under the cowardly 
pretense of a pacific demonstration, this rabble, secretly 
armed with the weapons of the bravo, fell into marching 
order, ill-treated and disarmed the detached patrols and 



66 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

sentries of the National Guard they met with on their 
progress, and, on debouching from the Rue de la Paix, 
with the cry of "Down with the Central Committee I 
Down with the assassins ! The National Assembly for- 
ever!" attempted to break through the line drawn up 
there, and thus to carry by a surprise the headquarters of 
the National Guard in the Place Vendome. In reply to 
their pistol shots, the regular sommations (the French 
equivalent of the English Riot Act) were made, and, 
proving ineffective, fire was commanded by the gen- 
eral of the National Guard. One volley dispersed into 
wild flight the silly coxcombs, who expected that the 
mere exhibition of their "respectability" would have the 
same effect upon the revolution of Paris as Joshua's 
trumpets upon the walls of Jericho. The runaways left 
behind them two National Guards killed, nine severely 
wounded (among them a member of the Central Com- 
mittee), and the whole scene of their exploit strewn with 
revolvers, daggers, and sword-canes, in evidence of the 
"unarmed" character of their "pacific" demonstration. 
When, on the 13th of June, 1849, the National Guard 
m.ade a really pacific demonstration in protest against 
the felonious assault of French troops upon Rome, Chan- 
garnier, then general of the party of order, was ac- 
claimed by the National Assembly, and especially by M. 
Thiers, as the saviour of society, for having launched his 
troops from all sides upon these unarmed men, to shoot 
and sabre them down, and to trample them under their 
horses' feet. Paris, then, was placed under a state of 
siege. Dufaure hurried through the Assembly new laws 
of repression. New arrests, new proscriptions — a new 
reign of terror set in. But the lower orders manage 
these things otherwise. The Central Committee of 1871 
simply ignored the heroes of the "pacific demonstration" ; 



THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH 67 

SO much so, that only two days later they were enabled 
to muster, under Admiral Saisset, for that armed demon- 
stration, crowned by the famous stampede to Versailles. 
In their reluctance to continue the civil war opened by 
Thiers' burglarious attempt on Montmartre, the Cen- 
tral Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a 
decisive mistake in not at once marching upon Versailles, 
then completely helpless, and thus putting an end to the 
conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, 
the party of order was again allowed to try its strength 
at the ballot-box, on the 26th of March, the day of the 
election of the Commune. On that day, at the polls, they, 
these men of order, were blandly exchanging words of 
conciliation with their too generous conquerors, while 
muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate 
them in due time. 

Now, look at the reverse of the medal. Thiers opened 
his second campaign against Paris in the beginning of 
April. The first batch of Parisian prisoners brought 
into Versailles was subjected to revolting atrocities, 
while Ernest Picard, with his hands in his trousers' pock- 
ets, strolled about jeering them, and while Mesdames 
Thiers and Favre, in the midst of their ladies of 
honor (?) applauded, from the balcony, the outrages of 
the Versailles mob. The captured soldiers of the line 
were massacred in cold blood ; our brave friend. General 
Duval, the ironfounder, was shot without any form of 
trial. Galliffet, the kept man of his wife, so notorious for 
her shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second 
Empire, boasted in a proclamation of having commanded 
the murder of a small troop of National Guards, with 
their captain and lieutenant, surprised and disarmed by 
his chasseurs. Vinoy, the runaway, was appointed 
Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor by Thiers, for his 



68 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

general order to shoot down every soldier of the line 
taken in the ranks of the Federals. Desmarets, the gen- 
darme, was decorated for the treacherous butcher-like 
chopping in pieces of the high-souled and chivalrous 
Flourens, who had saved the heads of the Government 
of Defense on the 31st of October, 1870. " The encour- 
aging particulars" of his assassination were triumphantly 
expatiated upon by Thiers in the National Assembly. 
With the elevated vanity of a parliamentary Tom Thumb, 
permitted to play the part of a Tamerlane, he denied the 
rebels against his littleness every right of civilized war- 
fare, up to the right of neutrality for ambulances. Noth- 
ing more horrid than that monkey allowed for a time to 
give full fling to his tigerish instincts, as foreseen by 
Voltaire. 

After the decree of the Commune of the 7th of April, 
ordering reprisals and declaring it to be its duty ''to pro- 
tect Paris against the cannibal exploits of the Versailles 
banditti, and to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a 
tooth," Thiers did not stop the barbarous treatment of 
prisoners, moreover insulting them in his bulletins as 
follows: "Never have more degraded countenances of 
a degraded democracy met the afflicted gaze of honest 
men" — honest, like Thiers himself and his ministerial 
ticket-of-leave men. Still the shooting of prisoners was 
suspended for a time. Hardly, however, had Thiers and 
his Decembrist generals become aware that the Com- 
munal decree of reprisals was but an empty threat, that 
even their gendarme spies caught in Paris under the 
disguise of National Guards, that even sergents-de-ville 
taken with incendiary shells upon them, were spared — 
when the wholesale shooting of prisoners was resumed 
and carried on uninterruptedly to the end. Houses to 
which National Guards had fled were surrounded by gen- 



THE EIGHTEENTH OF MARCH 69 

darmes, inundated with petroleum (which here occurs 
for the first time in this war), and then set fire to, the 
charred corpses being afterwards brought out by the am- 
bulance of the Press at the Ternes. Four National 
Guards having surrendered to a troop of mounted chas- 
seurs at Belle £pine, on the 25th of April, were after- 
wards shot down, one after another, by the captain, a 
worthy man of Galliffet's. One of his four victims, left 
for dead, Sheffer, crawled back to the Parisian outposts, 
and deposed to this fact before a commission of the Com- 
mune. When Tolain . interpellated the War Minister 
upon the report of this commission, the Rurals drowned 
his voice and forbade Leflo to answer. It would be an 
insult to their "glorious" army to speak of its deeds. The 
flippant tone in which Thiers' bulletins announced the 
bayoneting of the Federals surprised asleep at Moulin 
Saquet, and the wholesale fusillades at Clamart shocked 
the nerves even of the not over-sensitive London Times. 
But it would be ludicrous to-day to attempt recounting 
the merely preliminary atrocities committed by the bom- 
barders of Paris and the fomenters of a slaveholders' re- 
bellion protected by foreign invasion. Amidst all these 
horrors, Thiers, forgetful of his parliamentary laments 
on the terrible responsibility weighing down his dwarfish 
shoulders, boasts in his bulletins that VAssemhlee siege 
paisiblement (the Assembly continues meeting in peace), 
and proves by his constant carousals, now with Decem- 
brist generals, now with German princes, that his diges- 
tion is not troubled in the least, not even by the ghosts 
of Lecomte and Clement Thomas. 



CHAPTER III 

THE HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 

On the dawn of the i8th of March, Paris arose to the 
thunderburst of ''Vive la Commune !" What is the Com- 
mune, that sphinx so tantaUzing to the bourgeois mind? 

"The proletarians of Paris," said the Central Commit- 
tee in its manifesto of the i8th of March, "amidst the fail- 
ures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood 
that the hour has struck for them to save the situation 
by taking into their own hands the direction of public 

affairs They have understood that it is 

their imperious duty and their absolute right to render 
themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing 
upon the governmental power." But the working class 
cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State ma- 
chinery, and wield it for its own purposes. 

The centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs 
of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judica- 
ture — organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and 
hierarchic division of labor — originates from the days of 
absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society 
as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism. 
Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of 
medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, mu- 
nicipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. 
The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 
eighteenth century swept away all these relics of bygone 
times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its 
last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern State 

70 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 7^ 

edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring 
of the coalition wars of old semifeudal Europe against 
modern France. During the subsequent regimes the 
Government, placed under parliamentary control — that 
is, under the direct control of the propertied classes — 
became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and 
crushing taxes ; with its irresistible allurements of place, 
pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of con- 
tention between the rival factions and adventurers of the 
ruling classes ; but its political character changed simul- 
taneously with the economic changes of society. At the^ 
same pace at which the progress of modern industry de- 
veloped, widened, intensified the class-antagonism be- 
tween capital and labor, the State power assumed more 
and more the character of the national power of capital 
over labor, of a public force organized for social en- 
slavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every 
revolution marking a progressive phase in the class strug- 
gle, the purely repressive character of the State power 
stands out in bolder and bolder relief. The Revolution of 
1830, resulting in the transfer of government from the 
landlords to the capitalists, transferred it from the more 
remote to the more direct antagonists of the working- 
men. The bourgeois Republicans, who, in the name of 
the Revolution of 1848, took the State power, used it 
for the June massacres, in order to convince the working 
class that "social" republic meant the republic ensuring 
their social subjection, and in order to convince the royal- 
ist bulk of the bourgeois and landlord class that they 
might safely leave the cares and emoluments of govern- 
ment to the bourgeois "Republicans." However, after 
their one heroic exploit of June, the bourgeois Repub- 
licans had, from the front, to fall back to the rear of the 
"Party of Order" — a combination formed by all the rival 



72 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

fractions and factions of the appropriating class in their 
now openly declared antagonism to the producing classes. 
The proper form of their joint stock Government was 
the Parliamentary Republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its 
President. Theirs was a regime of avowed class ter- 
rorism and deliberate insult towards the *Vile multitude." 
If the Parliamentary Republic, as M. Thiers said, "di- 
vided them [the different fractions of the ruling class] 
least," it opened an abyss between that class and the whole 
body of society outside their spare ranks. The restraints 
by which their own divisions had under former regimes 
still checked the State power, were removed by their 
union; and in view of the threatening upheaval of the 
proletariat, they now used that State power mercilessly 
and ostentatiously as the national war engine of capital 
against labor. In their uninterrupted crusade against the 
producing masses they were, however, bound not only 
to invest the executive with continually increased powers 
of repression, but at the same time to divest their own 
parliamentary stronghold — the National Assembly — one 
by one, of all its own means of defense against the Execu- 
tive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bona- 
parte, turned them out. The natural offspring of the 
"Party-of-Order" Republic was the Second Empire. 

The Empire, with the coiip d'etat for its certificate of 
birth, universal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword 
for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the 
large mass of producers not directly involved in the strug- 
gle of capital and labor. It professed to save the work- 
ing class by breaking down parliamentarism, and, with 
it, the undisguised subserviency of Government to the 
propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied 
classes by upholding their economic supremacy over 
the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 73 

all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national 
glory. In reality, it was the only form of government 
possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, 
and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty 
of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed throughout the 
world as the saviour of society. Under its sway, bour- 
geois society, freed from political cares, attained a de- 
velopment unexpected even by itself. Its industry and 
commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial 
swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of 
the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, 
meretricious, and debased luxury. The State power, ap- 
parently soaring high above society, was at the same time 
itself the greatest scandal of that society and the very 
hotbed of all its corruptions. Its own rottenness, and 
the rottenness of the society it had saved, were laid bare 
by the bayonet of Prussia, herself eagerly bent upon 
transferring the supreme seat of that regime from Paris 
to Berlin. Imperialism is, at the same time, the most 
prostitute and the ultimate form of the State power which 
nascent middle-class society had commenced to elaborate 
as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and 
which full-grown bourgeois society had finally trans- 
formed into a means for the enslavement of labor by 
capital. 

The direct antithesis to the Empire was the Commune. 
The cry of "Social Republic," with which the revolution 
of February was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did 
but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that was 
not only to supersede the monarchical form of class-rule, 
but class-rule itself. The Commune was the positive 
form of that Republic. 

Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, 
and, at the same time, the social stronghold of the French 



74 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

working class, had risen in arms against the attempt of 
Thiers and the Rurals to restore and perpetuate that qM 
governmental power bequeathed t© them by the Empire. 
Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the 
siege, it had got rid of the army and replaced it by a 
National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working- 
men. This fact was now^to be transforrned into an in- 
stitution. The first decree of the Cprnmune, therefore, 
was the suppression of the standing army, and the sub- 
stitution for it of the armed people. 

The Commune was formed of the municipal council- 
lors, chosen by universal suffrage in various wards of the 
town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The 
majority of its members were naturally workingmen, or 
acknowledged representatives of the working class. The 
Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, 
body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead 
of continuing to be the agent of the central Government, 
the police was at once stripped of its political attributes 
and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable 
agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all 
other branches of the administration. From the mem- 
bers of the Commune downwards, the public service had 
to be done at workmen's zvages. The vested interests 
and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries 
of State disappeared along with the high dignitaries 
themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private 
property of the tools of the central Government. Not 
only municipal administration, but the whole initiative 
hitherto exercised by the State was laid into the hands 
of the Commune. 

Having once got rid of the standing army and the 
police, the physical force elements of the old Govern- 
ment, the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual 



THE SIGNIFICANCE QF THE COMMUNE 75 

force of r^ression, the "parson-^ower," by the disestab- 
li^shment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary 
bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of 
private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful 
in' imitation of their predecessors, the Apostles. The 
whole of the educational institutions were opened to the 
people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all 
interference of Church and State. Thus, not only was 
education made accessible to all, but science itself freed 
from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental 
force had imposed upon it. 

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that 
sham independence which had but served to mask theii: 
abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to 
which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of 
allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates 
and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revoca- 
ble. 

The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model 
to all the great industrial centers of France. The com- 
munal regime once established in Paris and the second- 
ary centers, the old centralized Government would in the 
provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government 
of the producers. In a rough sketch of national organi- 
zation which the Commune had no time to develop, it is 
clearly stated that the Commune was to be the political 
form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the 
rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a 
national militia, with an extremely short term of service. 
The rural communes of each district were to adminis- 
ter their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in 
the central town, and these district assemblies were again 
to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each 
delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the 



76 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constitu- 
ents. The few but important functions which still would 
remain for a central government were not to be sup- 
pressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to 
be discharged by communal, and therefore strictly re- 
sponsible, agents. The unity of the nation was not to be 
broken; but, on the contrary, to be organized by the 
Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the 
destruction of the State power which claimed to be the 
embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior 
to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic 
excrescence. While the micrely repressive organs of the 
old governmental power were to be amputated, its legiti- 
mate functions were to be wrested from an authority 
usurping preeminence over society itself, and restored to 
the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding 
once in three or six years which member of the ruling 
class was to represent the people in Parliament, universal 
suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Com- 
munes, as individual suffrage serves every other em- 
ployer in the search for the workmen and managers in his 
business. And it is well known that companies, like in- 
dividuals, in matters of real business generally know how 
to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for 
once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the 
other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit 
of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by 
hierarchic investiture. 

It is generally the fate of completely new historical 
creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and 
even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear 
a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which 
breaks the modern State power, has been mistaken for a 
reproduction of the medieval communes, which first 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 77 

preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of, that 
very State power. The Communal Constitution has been 
mistaken for an attempt to break up into a federation 
of small States, as dreamt of by Montesquieu and the 
Girondins, that unity of great nations which, if origin- 
ally brought about by political force, has now become a 
powerful coefficient of social production. The antagon- 
ism of the Commune against the State power has been 
mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle 
against over-centralization. Peculiar historical circum- 
stances may have prevented the classical development, as 
in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may 
have allowed, as in England, to complete the great central 
State organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and 
ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually 
hereditary magistrates in the counties. The Communal 
Constitution would have restored to the social body all 
the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding 
upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By 
this one act it would have initiated the regeneration of 
France. The provincial French middle class saw in the 
Commune an attempt to restore the sway their order had 
held over the country under Louis Philippe, and which, 
under Louis Napoleon, was supplanted by the pretended 
rule of the country over the towns. In reality, the Com- 
munal Constitution brought the rural producers under 
the intellectual lead of the central towns of their dis- 
tricts, and there secured to them, in the workingmen, the 
natural trustees of their interests. The very existence 
of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local 
municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon th^ now 
superseded State power. It could only enter into the 
head of a Bismarck — who, when not engaged on his in- 
trigues of blood and iron, always likes to resume his old 



78 . THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

trade, so befitting his mental calibre, of contributor to 
Kladderadatch (the Berlin Punch) — it could only enter in 
such a head, to ascribe to the Paris Commune aspirations 
after that caricature of the old French municipal organi- 
zation of 1 79 1, the Prussian municipal constitution, which 
degrades the town governments to mere secondary wheels 
in the police machinery of the Prussian State. The Com- 
mune made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, 
cheap government, a reality, by destroying the two great- 
est sources of expenditure — ^the standing army and State 
functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non- 
existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the 
normal incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class- 
rule. It supplied the Republic with the basis of really 
democratic institutions. But neither cheap government 
nor the "true Republic" was its ultimate aim ; they were 
its mere concomitants. 

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Com- 
mune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of inter- 
ests which construed it in their favor, show that it was 
a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous 
forms of government had been emphatically repressive. 
Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working- 
class government, the product of the struggle of the pro- 
ducing against the appropriating class, the political form 
at last discovered under which to work out the economic 
emancipation of labor. 

Except on this last condition, the Communal Consti- 
tution would have been an impossibility and a de- 
lusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co- 
exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The 
Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uproot- 
ing the economic foundations upon which rests the 
existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 79 

With labor emancipated, every man becomes a work- 
ingman, and productive labor ceases to be a class at- 
tribute. 

It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all 
the immense literature, for the last sixty years, about 
emancipation of labor, no sooner do the workingmen 
anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a 
will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology 
of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles 
of Capital and Wage-slavery (the landlord now is but 
the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if capitalist 
society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, 
with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions 
still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid 
bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish 
property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, 
the Commune intends to abolish that class-property which 
makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It 
aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It 
wanted to make individual property a truth by transform- 
ing the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly 
the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere 
instruments of free and associated labor. But this is 
Communism, "impossible" Communism! Why, those 
members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough 
to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present 
system — and they are many — have become the obtrusive 
and full-mouthed apostles of cooperative production. If 
cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a 
snare ; if it is to supersede the capitalist system ; if united 
cooperative societies are to regulate national production 
upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own con- 
trol, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and 
periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist 



8o THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

production — what else, gentlemen, would it be but Com- 
munism, ''possible" Communisln? 

The working class did not expect miracles from the 
Commune. They have no ready-made Utopias to intro- 
duce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to 
work out their own emancipation, and along with it that 
higher form to which present society is irresistibly tend- 
ing, by its own economic agencies, they will have to 
) pass through long struggles, through a series of historic 
processes, transforming circumstances and men. They 
ji have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of 
1 1 the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois 
|j society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of 
I their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act 
^ up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the 
coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with the 
pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well- 
wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ig- 
norant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular 
tone of scientific infallibility. 

When the Paris Commune took the management of the 
revolution in its own hands ; when plain workingmen for 
the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental 
privilege of their "natural superiors," and, under cir- 
cumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their 
work modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently — per- 
formed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted 
to one-fifth of what, according to high scientific author- 
ity, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain 
metropolitan school board — the old world writhed in con- 
vulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the sym- 
bol of the Republic of Labor, floating over the Hotel de 
Ville. 

And yet, this was the first revolution in which the 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 8i 

working class was openly acknowledged as the only class 
capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the 
Paris middle class — shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants 
— the wealthy capitalist alone excepted. The Commune 
had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever 
recurring cause of dispute among the middle class them- 
selves — the debtor and creditor accounts. The same por- 
tion of the middle class, after they had assisted in putting 
down the workingmen's insurrection of June, 1848, had 
been at once unceremoniously sacrificed to their creditors 
by the then Constituent Assembly. But this was not 
their only motive for now rallying round the working 
class. They felt there was but one alternative — the Com- 
m.une, or the Empire — under whatever name it might 
reappear. The Empire had ruined them economically by 
the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale 
financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to 
the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and 
the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It 
had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them 
morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism 
by handing over the education of their children to the 
Freres Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling 
as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war 
which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made — the 
disappearance of the Empire. In fact, after the exodus 
from Paris of the high Bonapartist and capitalist 
Boheme, the true middle-class Party of Order came out 
in the shape of the Union Re public aine, enrolling them- 
selves under the colors of the Commune and defending 
it against the wilful misconstruction of Thiers. Whether 
the gratitude of this great body of the middle class will 
stand the present severe trial, time must show. 
The Commune was perfectly right in telling the peas- 



82 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

ants that "its victory was their only hope." Of all the 
lies hatched at Versailles and reechoed by the glorious 
European penny-a-liner, one of the most tremendous 
was that the Rurals represented the French peasantry. 
Think only of the love of the French peasant for the 
men to whom, after 1815, he had to pay the milliard of 
indemnity ! In the eyes of the French peasant, the very 
existence of a great landed proprietary is in itself an en- 
croachment on his conquests of 1789. The bourgeoisie, 
in 1848, had burthened his plot of land with the additional 
tax of forty- five centimes in the franc ; but then it did so 
in the name of the revolution ; while now it had fomented 
a civil war against the revolution, to shift on the peas- 
ant's shoulders the chief load of the five milliards of in- 
demnity to be paid to the Prussian. The Commune, on 
the other hand, in one of its first proclamations, de- 
clared that the true originators of the war would be 
made to pay its cost. The Commune would have de- 
livered the peasant of the blood tax, would have given 
him a cheap government, transformed his present blood- 
suckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial 
vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and 
responsible to, himself. It would have freed him of the 
tyranny of the garde champetre,'^ the gendarme, and the 
prefect; would have put enlightenment by the school- 
master in the place of stultification by the priest. And 
the French peasant is, above all, a man of reckoning. He 

^ The garde champetre is a rural guard, appointed in each rural commune 
(corresponding in size to the smallest of our eastern townships), for the 
protection of crops, cattle and other farm property. While the mounted 
gendarmes police the national and departmental highways, he polices the 
fields and communal by-ways, enforces the communal ordinances and the 
game laws, arrests poachers, etc. On account of his acquaintance with every 
man, woman, and child residing in the commune, and of his dependence 
upon the bourgeois officials for his position, he is frequently required 
to act the part of a political spy and can in many small ways be very 
troublesome or even tyrannical. — Note to the American Edition. 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 83 

would find it extremely reasonable that the pay of the 
priest, instead of being extorted by the tax-gatherer, 
should only depend upon the spontaneous action of the 
parishioners' religious instincts. Such were the great 
immediate boons which the rule of the Commune — and 
that rule alone — held out to the French peasantry. It is, 
therefore, quite superfluous here to expatiate upon the 
more complicated but vital problems which the Commune 
alone was able, and at the same time compelled, to solve 
in favor of the peasant, viz., the hypothecary debt (mort- 
gage), lying like a.n incubus upon his parcel of soil, the 
proletariat fonder (land-holding proletariat), daily grow- 
ing upon the land, and his expropriation from it enforced, 
at a more and more rapid rate, by the very development 
of modern agriculture and the competition of capitalist 
farming. 

The French peasant had elected Louis Bonaparte presi- 
dent of the Republic ; but the Party of Order created the 
Empire. What the French peasant really wants he com- 
menced to show in 1849 ^-nd 1850, by opposing his mayor 
to the Government's prefect, his schoolmaster to the Gov- 
ernment's priest, and himself to the Government's gen- 
darme. All the laws made by the Party of Order in 
January and February, 1850, were avowed measures of 
repression against the peasant. The peasant was a 
Bonapartist, because the Great Revolution, with all its 
benefits to him, was, in his eyes, personified in Napoleon. 
This delusion, rapidly breaking down under the Second 
Empire (and in its very nature hostile to the Rurals), 
this prejudice of the past, how could it have withstood 
the appeal of the Commune to the living interests and 
urgent v/ants of the peasantry? 

The Rurals — this was, in fact, their chief apprehension 
— knew that three months' free communication of Com- 



84 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

munal Paris with the provinces would bring about a gen- 
eral rising of the peasants, and hence their anxiety to es- 
tablish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the 
spread of the rinderpest. 

If the Commune was thus the true representative of 
all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore 
the truly national Government, it was, at the same time, 
a workingmen's Government, as the bold champion of the 
emancipation of labor, emphatically international. With- 
in sight of the Prussian army, that had annexed to Ger- 
many two French provinces, the Commune annexed to 
France the working people all over the world. 

The Second Empire had been the jubilee of cosmo- 
politan blacklegism, the rakes of all countries rushing 
in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder 
of the French people. Even at this moment the right 
hand of Thiers is Ganesco, the foul Wallachian, and his 
left hand is Markowski, the Russian spy. The Com- 
mune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying 
for the immortal cause. Between the foreign war lost by 
their treason, and the civil war fomented by their con- 
spiracy with the foreign invader, the bourgeoisie had 
found the time to display their patriotism by organizing 
police-hunts upon the Germans in France; the Com- 
mune made a German workingman its Minister of La- 
bor. Thiers, the bourgeoisie, the Second Empire, had 
continually deluded Poland by loud professions of sym- 
pathy, while in reality betraying her to, and doing the 
dirty work of, Russia; the Commune honored the 
heroic sons of Poland by placing them at the head of 
the defenders of Paris. And, to broadly mark the new 
era of history, it was conscious of initiating, under the 
eyes of the conquering Prussians on the one side and of 
the Bonapartist army, led by Bonapartist generals, on the 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 85 

Other, the Commune pulled down that colossal symbol of 
martial glory, the Vendome column. 

The great social measure of the Commune was its own 
working existence. Its special measures could but be- 
token the tendency of a government of the people by the 
people. Such were the abolition of the nightwork of 
journeyman bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of 
the employers' practice to reduce wages by levying upon 
their workpeople fines under manifold pretexts— a pro- 
cess in which the employer combines in his own person 
the parts of legislator, judge, and executioner, and filches 
the money to boot. Another measure of this class was 
the surrender, to associations of workmen, under reserve 
of compensation, of all closed workshops and factories, 
no matter whether the respective capitalists had ab- 
sconded or preferred to strike work. 

The financial measures of the Commune, remarkable 
for their sagacity and moderation, could only be such as 
were compatible with the state of a besieged town. Con- 
sidering the colossal robberies committed upon the City 
of Paris by the great financial companies and contractors, 
under the protection of Haussmann, the Commune would 
have had an incomparably better title to confiscate their 
property than Louis Napoleon had against the Orleans 
family. The Hohenzollern and the English oligarchs, 
who both have derived a good deal of their estates from 
Church plunder, were, of course, greatly shocked at the 
Commune clearing but 8,000 francs out of secularization. 

While the Versailles Government, as soon as it had re- 
covered some spirit and strength, used the most violent 
means against the Commune ; while it put down the free 
expression of opinion all over France, even to the for- 
bidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; 
while it subjected Versailles and the rest of France to 



86 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

an espionage far surpassing that of the Second Empire; 
while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers 
printed at Paris, and sifted all correspondence from and 
to Paris ; while in the National Assembly the most timid 
attempts to put in a word for Paris were howled down 
in a manner unknown even to the Chamhre introuvable 
of 1816; with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, 
and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris 
— would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its 
trust by affecting to keep up all the decencies and ap- 
pearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? 
Had the Government of the Commune been akin to that 
of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion 
to suppress Party-of-Order papers at Paris than there 
was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles. 

It was irritating, indeed, to the Rurals that at the very 
same time they declared the return to the Church to be 
the only means of salvation for France, the infidel Com- 
mune unearthed the peculiar mysteries of the Picpus nun- 
nery and of the St. Laurent Church. It was a satire upon 
M. Thiers that, while he showered grand crosses upon 
the Bonapartist generals, in acknowledgment of their 
mastery in losing battles, signing capitulations, and turn- 
ing cigarettes at Wilhelmshohe, the Commune dismissed 
and arrested its generals whenever they were suspected of 
neglecting their duties. The expulsion from, and arrest 
by, the Commune of one of its members who had slipped 
in under a false name, and had undergone at Lyons six 
days' imprisonment for simple bankruptcy, was it not a 
deliberate insult hurled at the forger, Jules Favre, then 
still the Foreign Minister of France, still selling France 
to Bismarck, and still dictating his orders to that para- 
gon Government of Belgium? But, indeed, the Com- 
mune did not pretend to infallibility, the invariable at- 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE S7 

tribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published 
its doings and sayings, it initiated the public into all its 
shortcomings. 

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its 
true agents, men of a different stamp ; some of them sur- 
vivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight 
into the present movement, but preserving popular in- 
fluence by their known honesty and courage, or by the 
sheer force of tradition; others mere bawlers, who by 
dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereo- 
typed declamation against the Government of the day, 
have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the 
first water. After the i8th of March some such men did 
also turn up, and in some cases contrived to play preemi- 
nent parts. As far as their power went, they hampered 
the real action of the working class, exactly as men of 
that sort have hampered the full development of every 
previous revolution. They are an unavoidable evil ; with 
time they are shaken off ; but time was not allowed to the 
Commune. 

Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had 
wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of the mere- 
tricious Paris of the Second Empire. No longer was 
Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, 
American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex- 
serf-ov/ners, and Wallachian boyards. No more corpses 
at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any rob- 
beries; in fact, for the first time since the days of Feb- 
ruary, 1848, the streets of Paris w^re safe, and that with- 
out any police of any kind. "We," said a member of 
the Commune, "hear no longer of assassination, theft, and 
personal assault; it seems, indeed, as if the police had 
dragged along with it to Versailles all its conservative 
friends." The cocottes had refound the scent of their 



88 TPIE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

protectors — the absconding men of family, religion, and, 
above all, of property. In their stead, the real women 
of Paris showed again at the surface — heroic, noble, and 
devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, think- 
ing, fighting, bleeding Paris — almost forgetful, in its 
incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates 
— radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative ! 

Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old 
world at Versailles — ^that assembly of the ghouls of all 
defunct regimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed 
upon the carcass of the nation — with a tail of antediluvian 
Republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assem- 
bly, the slaveholders' rebellion, relying for the mainte- 
nance of their Parliamentary Republic upon the vanity 
of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 
1789 by holding their ghastly meetings in the Jeu de 
Paitme. There it was, this Assembly, the representative 
of everything dead in France, propped up into a sem- 
blance of life by nothing but the swords of the generals 
of Louis Bonaparte. Paris all truth, Versailles all lie; 
and that lie vented through the mouth of Thiers. 

Thiers tells a deputation of the mayors of the Seine- 
et-Oise — "You may rely upon my word, which I have 
never broken !" He tells the Assembly itself that "it was 
the most freely elected and most liberal Assembly France 
ever possessed" ; he tells his motley soldiery that it was 
"the admiration of the world, and the finest army France 
ever possessed" ; he tells the provinces that the bombard- 
ment of Paris by him was a myth : "If some cannon- 
shots have been fired, it is not the deed of the army of 
Versailles, but of some insurgents trying to make be- 
lieve that they are fighting, while they dare not show 
their faces." He again tells the provinces that "the ar- 
tillery of Versailles does not bombard Paris, but only 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMUNE 89 

cannonades it." He tells the Archbishop of Paris that 
the pretended executions and reprisals ( !) attributed to 
the Versailles troops were all moonshine. He tells Paris 
that he was only anxious "to free it from the hideous 
tyrants who oppress it," and that, in fact, the Paris of 
the Commune was "but a handful of criminals." 

The Paris of M. Thiers was not the real Paris of the 
"vile multitude," but a phantom Paris, the Paris of the 
francs-fileurs, the Paris of the Boulevards, male and fe- 
male—the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, 
now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary 
boheme, and its cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, 
and Saint-Germain; considering the civil war but an 
agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through 
telescopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing 
by their own honor and that of their prostitutes that the 
performance was far better got up than it used to be at the 
Porte St. Martin. The men who fell were really dead; 
the cries of the wounded were cries in good earnest ; and, 
besides, the whole thing was so intensely historical. 

This is the Paris of M. Thiers, as the Emigration of 
Coblentz was the France of M. de Calonne. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE REPRESSION 

The first attempt of the slaveholders^ conspiracy to put 
down Paris by getting the Prussians to occupy it, was 
frustrated by Bismarck's refusal. The second attempt, 
that of the i8th of March, ended in the rout of the army 
and the flight to Versailles of the Government, which 
ordered the whole administration to break up and follow 
in its track. By the semblance of peace-negotiations with 
Paris, Thiers found the time to prepare for war against 
it. But where to find an army? The remnants of the 
line regiments were weak in number and unsafe in char- 
acter. His urgent appeal to the provinces to succor Ver- 
sailles, by their National Guards and volunteers, met with 
a flat refusal. Brittany alone furnished a handful of 
Choudas fighting under a white flag, every one of them 
wearing on his breast the heart of Jesus in white cloth, 
and shouting "Vive le RoiT (Long live the King!) 
Thiers was, therefore, compelled to collect, in hot haste, 
a motley crew, composed of sailors, marines. Pontifical 
Zouaves, Valentin's gendarmes, and Pietri's sergents de 
ville and mouchards. This army, however, would have 
been ridiculously ineffective without the instalments of im- 
perialist war-prisoners, which Bismarck granted in num- 
bers just sufficient to keep the civil war a-going, and keep 
the Versailles Government in the abject dependence on 
Prussia. During the war itself, the Versailles police had 
to look after the Versailles army, while the gendarmes had 
to drag it on by exposing themselves at all posts of dan- 

90 



THE REPRESSION 91 

ger. Theforts which fell were not taken but bought. The 
heroism of the Federals convinced Thiers that the resist- 
ance of Paris was not to be broken by his own strategic 
genius and the bayonets at his disposal. 

Meanwhile, his relations with the provinces became 
more and more difficult. Not one single address of ap- 
proval came in to gladden Thiers and his Rurals. Quite 
the contrary. Deputations and addresses demanding, in 
a tone anything but respectful, conciliation with Paris on 
the basis of the unequivocal recognition of the Republic, 
the acknowledgment of the Communal liberties, and the 
dissolution of the National Assembly, whose mandate 
was extinct, poured in from all sides, and in such numbers 
that Dufaure, Thiers' Minister of Justice, in his circu- 
lar of April 23d to the public prosecutors, commanded 
them to treat "the cry of conciliation" as a crime. In re- 
gard, however, to the hopeless prospect held out by his 
campaign, Thiers resolved to shift his tactics by ordering, 
all over the country, municipal elections to take place on 
the 30th of April, on the basis of the new municipal law 
dictated by himself to the National Assembly. What 
with the intrigues of his prefects, what with police intimi- 
dation, he felt quite sanguine of imparting, by the verdict 
of the provinces, to the National Assembly that moral 
power it had never possessed, and of getting at last from 
the provinces the physical force required for the con- 
quest of Paris. 

His banditti-warfare against Paris, exalted in his own 
bulletins, and the attempts of his Ministers at the estab- 
lishment, throughout France, of a reign of terror, Thiers 
was from the beginning anxious to accompany with a lit- 
tle byplay of conciliation, which had to serve more than 
one purpose. It was to dupe the provinces, to inveigle 
the middle-class element in Paris, and, above all, to afford 



92 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

the professed Republicans in the National Assembly thd 
opportunity of hiding their treason against Paris behind 
their faith in Thiers. On the 2ist of March, when still 
without an army, he had declared to the Assembly: 
"Come what may, I will not send an army to Paris." On 
March 27th he rose again: "I have found the Republic 
an accomplished fact, and I am firmly resolved to main- 
tain it.'* In reality, he put down the revolution at Lyons 
ai:d Marseilles in the name of the Republic, while the 
roars of his Rurals drowned the very mention of its name 
at Versailles. After this exploit, he toned down the "ac- 
complished fact" into an hypothetical fact. The Orleans 
princes, whom he had cautiously warned off Bordeaux, 
were now, in flagrant breach of the law, permitted to 
intrigue at Dreux. The concessions held out by Thiers 
in his interminable interviews with the delegates from 
Paris and the provinces, although constantly varied in 
tone and color, according to time and circumstances, did 
in fact never come to more than the prospective restric- 
tion of revenge to the "handful of criminals implicated in 
the murder of Lecomte and Clement Thomas," on the 
well-understood premise that Paris and France were un- 
reservedly to accept M. Thiers himself as the best of 
possible Republics, as he, in 1830, had done with Louis 
Philippe. Even these concessions he not only took care 
to render doubtful by the official comments put upon them 
in the Assembly through his Ministers; he had his Du- 
faure to act. Dufaure, this old Orleanist lawyer, had 
always been the justiciary of the state of siege, as now in 
1871, under Thiers, so in 1839, under Louis Philippe, 
and in 1849, under Louis Bonaparte's presidency. While 
out of office he made a fortune by pleading for the Paris 
capitalists, and made political capital by pleading against 
the laws he had himself originated. He now hurried 



THE REPRESSION 93 

through the National Assembly not only a set of repres- 
sive laws which were, after the fall of Paris, to extirpate 
the last remnants of Republican liberty in France; he 
foreshadowed the fate of Paris by abridging the, for 
him, too slow procedure of courts-martial, and by a new- 
fangled, Draconic code of deportation. The Revolution 
of 1848, abolishing the penalty of death for political 
crimes, had replaced it by deportation. Louis Bonaparte 
did not dare, at least not in theory, to reestablish the 
regime of the guillotine. The Rural Assembly, not yet 
bold enough even to hint that the Parisians were not 
rebels, but assassins, had therefore to confine its prospec- 
tive vengeance against Paris to Dufaure's new code of 
deportation. Under all these circumstances Thiers him- 
self could not have gone on with his comedy of concilia- 
tion, had it not, as he intended it to do, drawn forth 
shrieks of rage from the Rurals, whose ruminating mind 
could understand neither the play, nor its necessities of 
hypocrisy, tergiversation, and procrastination. 

In sight of the impending municipal elections of April 
30th, Thiers enacted one of his great conciliation scenes 
on April 27th. Amidst a flood of sentimental rhetoric, 
he exclaimed from the tribune of the Assembly : "There 
exists no conspiracy against the Republic but that of 
Paris, which com.pels us to shed French blood. I repeat 
it again and again. Let those impious arms fall from 
the hands which hold them, and chastisement will be ar- 
rested at once by an act of peace excluding only the small 
number of criminals." To the violent interruption of 
the Rurals he replied: "Gentlemen, tell me, I implore 
you, am I wrong ? Do you really regret that I could have 
stated the truth that the criminals are only a handful ? Is 
it not fortunate in the midst of our misfortunes that those 
who have been capable to shed the blood of Clement 



94 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

Thomas and General Lecomte are but rare excep- 
tions?'' 

France, however, turned a deaf ear to what Thiers 
flattered himself to be a parliamentary siren's song. Out 
of 700,000 municipal councillors returned by the 35,000 
communes still left to France, the united Legitimists, 
Orleanists, and Bonapartists did not carry 8,000. The 
supplementary elections which followed were still more 
decidedly hostile. Thus, instead of getting from the prov- 
inces the badly needed physical force, the National Assem- 
bly lost even its last claim of moral force, that of being 
the expression of the universal suffrage of the country. 
To complete the discomfiture, the newly-chosen municipal 
councils of all the cities of France openly threatened the 
usurping Assembly at Versailles with a counter Assembly 
at Bordeaux. 

Then the long-expected moment of decisive action had 
at last come for Bismarck. He peremptorily summoned 
Thiers to send to Frankfort plenipotentiaries for the de- 
finitive settlement of peace. In humble obedience to the 
call of his master, Thiers hastened to despatch his trusty 
Jules Favre, backed by Pouyer-Quertier. Pouyer-Quer- 
tier, an "eminent" Rouen cotton-spinner, a fervent and 
even servile partisan of the Second Empire, had never 
found any fault with it save its commercial treaty with 
England, prejudicial to his own shop-interest. Hardly in- 
stalled at Bordeaux as Thiers's Minister of Finance, he 
denounced that "unholy" treaty, hinted at its near abro- 
gation, and had even the effrontery to try, although in 
vain (having counted without Bismarck), the immediate 
enforcement of the old protective duties against Alsace, 
where, he said, no previous international treaties stood in 
the way. This man, who considered counter-revolution 
as a means to put down wages at Rouen, and the sur- 



THE REPRESSION 95 

render of French provinces as a means to bring up the 
price of his wares in France, was he not the one predes- 
tined to be picked out by Thiers as the helpmate of Jules 
Favre in his last and crowning treason ? 

On the arrival at Frankfort of this exquisite pair of 
plenipotentiaries, bully Bismarck at once met them with 
the imperious alternative : "Either the restoration of the 
Empire, or the unconditional acceptance of my own peace 
terms !" These terms included a shortening of the inter- 
vals in which the war indemnity was to be paid, and the 
continued occupation of the Paris forts by Prussian troops 
until Bismarck should feel satisfied with the state of 
things in France; Prussia thus being recognized as the 
supreme arbiter in internal French politics ! In return 
for this he offered to let loose, for the extermination of 
Paris, the captive Bonapartist army, and to lend them 
the direct assistance of Emperor William's troops. He 
pledged his good faith by making payment of the first in- 
stalment of the indemnity dependent on the "pacification" 
of Paris. Such a bait was, of course, eagerly swallowed 
by Thiers and his plenipotentiaries. They signed the 
treaty of peace on the loth of May, and had it endorsed 
by the Versailles Assembly on the i8th. 

In the interval between the conclusion of peace and the 
arrival of the Bonapartist prisoners, Thiers felt the more 
bound to resume his comedy of conciliation, as his Re- 
publican tools stood in sore need of a pretext for blinking 
their eyes at the preparations for the carnage of Paris. 
As late as the i8th of May he replied to a deputation of 
middle-class conciliators : "Whenever the insurgents will 
make up their minds for capitulation, the gates of Paris 
shall be flung wide open during a week for all except the 
murderers of Generals Clement Thomas and Lecomte." 

A few days afterwards, when violently interpellated on 



9^ THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

these promises by the Rurals, he refused to enter into any 
explanations; not, however, without giving them this 
significant hint: "I tell you there are impatient men 
amongst you, men who are in too great a hurry. They 
must have another eight days; at the end of these eight 
days there will be no more danger, and the task will be 
proportionate to their courage and to their capacities." 
As soon as McMahon was able to assure him that he 
could shortly enter Paris, Thiers declared to the Assem- 
bly that "he would enter Paris, with the laws in his 
hands, and demand a full expiation from the wretches 
v/ho had sacrificed the lives of soldiers and destroyed 
public monuments." As the moment of decision drew 
near he said to the Assembly, "I shall be pitiless !" ; to 
Paris, that it was doomed; and to his Bonapartist ban- 
ditti, that they had State license to wreak vengeance upon 
Paris to their heart's content. At last when treachery 
had opened the gates of Paris to General Douai, on the 
2 1st of May, Thiers, on the 226., revealed to the Rurals 
the "goal" of his conciliation comedy, which they had so 
obstinately persisted in not understanding. " I told you 
a few days ago that we were approaching our goal; to- 
day I come to tell you the goal is reached. The victory 
of order, justice, and civilization is at last v/on!" 

So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois 
order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and 
drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then 
this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised 
savagery and lawless revenge. Each new crisis in the 
class struggle between tlie appropriator and the pro- 
ducer brings out this fact more glaringly. Even the atro- 
cities of the bourgeois in June, 1848, vanish before the 
ineffable infamy of 1871. The self-sacrificing heroism 
with which the population of Paris — men, women, and 



THE REPRESSION 97 

children:~fought for eight days after the entrance of the 
■ Versaillese, reflects as much the grandeur of their cause 
as the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate 
spirit of that civilization of which they are the merce- 
nary vindicators. A glorious civilization, indeed, the 
great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of 
corpses it made after the battle was over! 

To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his 
bloodhounds we must go back to the times of Sulla and 
the two Triumvirates of Rome. The same wholesale 
slaughter in cold blood ; the same disregard, in massacre, 
of age and sex ; the same system of torturing prisoners ; 
the same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class ; the 
same savage hunt after concealed leaders, lest one might 
escape; the same denunciations of political and private 
enemies ; the same indifference for the butchery of entire 
strangers to the feud. There is but this difference, that 
the Romans had no mitrailleuses for the despatch, in the 
lump, of the proscribed, and that they had not "the law 
in their hands," nor on their lips the cry of "civilization.'^ 
^ And after those horrors, look upon the other, still more 
hideous, face of that bourgeois civilization as described 
by its own press ! 

''With stray shots," writes the Paris correspondent of 
a London Tory paper, "still ringing in the distance, and 
untended wounded wretches dying amid the tombstones 
of Pere la Chaise — with 6,000 terror-stricken insurgents 
wandering in an agony of despair in the labyrinth of the 
catacombs, and v/retches hurried through the streets to 
be shot down in scores by the mitrailleuse — it is revolt- 
ing to see the cafes filled with the votaries of absinthe, 
billiards, and dominoes ; female profligacy perambulating 
the boulevards, and the sound of revelry disturbing the 
night from the cabinets particuliers of fashionable restau- 



9^ THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

rants." M. Edouard Herve writes in the Journal de 
Paris, a Versaillist journal suppressed by the Commune: 
'The way in which the population of Paris ( !) mani- 
fested its satisfaction yesterday was rather more than 
frivolous, and we fear it will grow worse as time pro- 
gresses. Paris has now a fete-day appearance, which is 
sadly out of place; and, unless we are to be called the 
Parisiens de la decadence, this sort of thing must come 
to an end." And then he quotes the passage from Tacitus : 
"Yet, on the morrow of that horrible struggle, even be- 
fore it was completely over, Rome, degraded and corrupt, 
began once more to wallow in the voluptuous slough 
which was destroying its body and polluting its soul — 
ali prcclia et vidnera, alibi balnea popinceqiie — here fights 
and wounds, there baths and restaurants." M. Herve 
only forgets to say that the ''population of Paris" he 
speaks of is but the population of the Paris of M. Thiers 
— the franc s-fileurs returning in throngs from Versailles, 
Saint Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain — the Paris of the 
"Decline." 1 

In all its bloody triumphs over the self-sacrificing 
champions of a new and better society, that nefarious 
civilization, based upon the enslavement of labor, drowns 
the moans of its victims in a hue-and-cry of calumny, re- 
verberated by a world-wide echo. The serene working- 
men's Paris of the Commune is suddenly changed into 
a pandemonium by the bloodhounds of "order." And 
what does this tremendous change prove to the bourgeois 
mind of all countries ? Why, that the Commune has con- 
spired against civilization ! The Paris people die enthu- 
siastically for the Commune in numbers unequalled in 

* For further quotations from the capitalist press concerning the hideous 
events of the " Bloody Week," see Appendix, page no. — Note to the Amer- 
icon Edition. 



THE REPRESSION 99 

any battle known to history. What does that prove? 
Why, that the Commune was not the people's own gov- 
ernment, but the usurpation of a handful of criminals! 
The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the 
barricades and on the place of execution. What does this 
prove? Why, that the demon of the Commune has 
changed them into Megseras and Hecatcs ! The modera- 
tion of the Commune during two months of undisputed 
sway is equaled only by the heroism of its defence. 
What does that prove ? Why, that for months the Com- 
mune carefully hid, under a mask of moderation and hu- 
manity, the bloodthirstiness of its fiendish instincts, to be 
let loose in the hour of its agony! 

The workingmen's Paris, in the act of its heroic self- 
holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monu- 
ments. While tearing to pieces the living body of the 
proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return 
triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes. 
The Government of Versailles cries, "Incendiarism!" 
and whispers this cue to all its agents, down to the re- 
motest hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as sus- 
pected of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of 
the whole world, which looks complacently upon the 
wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by hor- 
ror at the desecration of brick and mortar ! 

When governments give state-licenses to their navies 
to "kill, burii, and destroy," is that a license for incen- 
diarism? When the British troops wantonly set fire to 
the Capitol at Washington and to the summer palace of 
the Chinese Emperor, was that incendiarism? When the 
Prussians, not for military reasons, but out of the mere 
spite of revenge, burnt down, by the help of petroleum, 
towns like Chateaudun and innumerable villages, was 
that incendiarism? When Thiers, during six weeks, 



lOO THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

bombarded Paris, under the pretext that he wanted to set 
fire to those houses only in which there were people, was 
that incendiarism? In war, fire is an arm as legitimate 
as any. Buildings held by the enemy are shelled to set 
them on fire. If their defenders have to retire, they 
themselves light the flames to prevent the attack from 
making use of the buildings. To be burnt down has al- 
ways been the inevitable fate of all buildings situated in 
the front of battle of all the regular armies of the world. 
But in the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the 
only justifiable war in history, this is by no means to 
hold good ! The Commune used fire strictly as a means 
of defense. They used it to stop up to the Versailles 
troops those long straight avenues which Haussmann 
had expressly opened to artillery fire; they used it to 
cover their retreat, in the same way as the Versaillese, in 
their advance, used their shells which destroyed at least 
as many buildings as the fire of the Commune. It is a 
matter of dispute, even now, which buildings were set 
fire to by the defense, and which by the attack. And 
the defense resorted to fire only then, when the Versail- 
lese troops had already commenced their wholesale mur- 
dering of prisoners. Besides, the Commune had, long 
before, given full public notice that, if driven to extremi- 
ties, they would bury themselves under the ruins of Paris, 
and make Paris a second Moscow, as the Government of 
Defense, but only as a cloak for Its treason, had prom- 
ised to do. For this purpose Trochu had found them the 
petroleum. The Commune knew that its opponents cared 
nothing for the lives of the Paris people, but cared 
much for their own Paris buildings. And Thiers, on the 
other hand, had given them notice that he would be im- 
placable in his vengeance. No sooner had he got his 
army ready on one side, and the Prussians shutting up 



THE REPRESSION loi 

the trap on the other, than he proclaimed: "I shall be 
pitiless! The expiation will be complete, and justice will 
be stern!" If the acts of the Paris workingmen were 
vandalism, it v/as the vandalism of defense in despair, 
not the vandalism of triumph, like that which the Chris- 
tians perpetrated upon the really priceless art treasures 
of heathen antiquity; and even that vandalism has been 
justified by the historian as an unavoidable and com- 
paratively trifling concomitant to the Titanic struggle 
between a new society arising and an old one breaking 
down. It was still less the vandalism of Haussmann, 
razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the 
sightseer ! 

But the execution by the Commune of the sixty-four 
hostages, with the Archbishop of Paris at their head! 
The bourgeoisie and its army in June, 1848, reestablished 
a custom which had long disappeared from the practice 
of war — the shooting of their defenseless prisoners. This 
brutal custom has since been more or less strictly adhered 
to by the suppressors of all popular commotions in Eu- 
rope and India; thus proving that it constitutes a real 
"progress of civilization" ! On the other hand, the Prus- 
sians, in France, had reestablished the practice of taking 
hostages — innocent men, who, with their lives, were to 
answer to them for the acts of others. When Thiers, 
as we have seen, from the very beginning of the conflict, 
enforced the humane practice of shooting down the Com- 
munal prisoners, the Commune, to protect their lives, was 
obliged to resort to the Prussian practice of securing 
hostages. The lives of the hostages had been forfeited 
over and over again by the continued shooting of pris- 
oners on the part of the Versaillese. How could they 
be spared any longer after the carnage with which Mc- 
Mahon's pretorians celebrated their entrance into Paris? 



I02 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

Was even the last check upon the unscrupulous ferocity 
of bourgeois governments — the taking of hostages — to be 
made a mere sham of ? The real murderer of Archbishop 
Darboy is Thiers. The Commune again and again had 
offered to exchange the archbishop, and ever so many 
priests in the bargain, against the single Blanqui, then in 
the hands of Thiers. Thiers obstinately refused. He 
knew that with Blanqui he would give to the Commune 
a head ; while the archbishop would serve his purpose best 
in the shape of a corpse. Thiers acted upon the prece- 
dent of Cavaignac. How, in June, 1848, did not Cavai- 
gnac and his men of order raise shouts of horror by stig- 
matizing the insurgents as the assassins of Archbishop 
Af fre ! They knew perfectly well that the archbishop 
had been shot by the soldiers of order. M. Jacquemet, 
the archbishop's vicar-general, present on the spot, had 
immediately afterwards handed them in his evidence to 
that effect. 

All this chorus of calumny, which the party of order 
never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their 
victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days con- 
siders himself the legitimate successor to the baron of 
old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair 
against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a 
weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime. 

The conspiracy of the ruling class to break down the 
Revolution by a civil war carried on under the patronage 
of the foreign invader — a conspiracy which we have 
traced from the very 4th of September down to the en- 
trance of MacMahon's pretorians through the gate of 
St. Cloud — culminated in the carnage of Paris. Bis- 
marck gloats over the ruins of Paris, in which he saw 
perhaps the first instalment of that general destruction 
of great cities he had prayed for when still a mere Rural 



THE REPRESSION 103 

in the Prussian Chambre introuvable of 1849. He gloats 
over the cadavres of the Paris proletariat. For him this 
is not only the extermination of revolution, but the ex- 
tinction of France, now decapitated in reality, and by 
the French Government itself. With the shallowness 
characteristic of all successful statesmen, he sees but the 
surface of this tremendous historic event. When has 
history ever exhibited before the spectacle of a conqueror 
crowning his victory by turning into, not only the gen- 
darme, but the hired bravo of the conquered govern- 
ment? There existed no war between Prussia and the 
Commune of Paris. On the contrary, the Commune had 
accepted the peace preliminaries, and Prussia had an- 
nounced her neutrality. Prussia was, therefore, no bel- 
ligerent. She had acted the part of a bravo, a cowardly 
bravo, because incurring no danger; a hired bravo, be- 
cause stipulating beforehand the payment of her blood- 
money of five hundred millions on the fall of Paris. And 
thus, at last, came out the true character of the war, or- 
dained by Providence as a chastisement of godless and 
debauched France by pious and moral Germany! And 
this unparalleled breach of the law of nations, even as 
understood by the old-world lawyers, instead of arous- 
ing the "civilized" governments of Europe to declare 
the felonious Prussian Government, the mere tool of the 
St. Petersburg Cabinet, an outlaw amongst nations, only 
incites them to consider whether the few victims who 
escape the double cordon around Paris are not to be given 
up to the hangman at Versailles ! 

That after the most tremendous war of modern times, 
the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize 
for the common massacre of the proletariat — this un- 
paralleled event does indicate, not as Bismarck thinks, 
the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the 



I04 THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE 

crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest 
heroic effort of which old society is still capable is 
national war; and this is now proved to be a mere 
governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle 
of the classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that 
class struggle bursts out in civil war. Class rule is no 
longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the 
national Governments are one as against the proletariat! 

After Whit-Sunday, 1871, there can be neither peace 
nor truce possible between the workingmen of France 
and the appropriators of their produce. The iron hand 
of a mercenary soldiery may keep for a time both classes 
tied down in common oppression. But the battle must 
break out again and again in ever-growing dimensions, 
and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor 
in the end — the appropriating few, or the immense work- 
ing majority. And the French working class is only the 
vanguard of the modern proletariat. 

While the European Governments thus testify, before 
Paris, to the international character of class rule, they cry 
down the International Workingmen's Association — ^the 
international counter-organization of labor against the 
cosmopolitan organization of capital — as the head fountain 
of all these disasters. Thiers denounced it as the despot of 
labor, pretending to be its liberator. Picard ordered that 
all communications between the French Internationals 
and those abroad should be cut off. Count Jaubert, 
Thiers's mummified accomplice of 1835, declares it the 
great problem of all civilized governments to weed it out. 
The Rurals roar against it, and the whole European press 
joins the chorus. An honorable French writer, com- 
pletely foreign to our Association, speaks as follows: 
"The members of the Central Committee of the National 
Guard, as well as the greater part of the members of 



THE REPRESSION 105 

the Commune, are the most active, intelligent, and ener- 
getic minds of the International Workingmen's Asso- 
ciation; .... men who are thoroughly honest, 
sincere, intelligent, devoted, pure, and fanatical in the 
good sense of the v/ord." The police-tinged bourgeois 
mind naturally figures to itself the International Work- 
ingmen's Association as acting in the manner of a secret 
conspiracy, its central body ordering, from time to time, 
explosions in different countries. Our Association is, in 
fact, nothing but the international bond between the most 
advanced workingmen in the various countries of the civi- 
lized world. Wherever, in whatever shape, and under 
whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any con- 
stituency, it is but natural that members of our Associa- 
tion should stand in the foreground. The soil out of 
which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be 
stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out, 
the Government would have to stamp out the despotism 
of capital over labor — the condition of their own para- 
sitical existence. 

Workingmen's Paris, with its Commune, will be for- 
ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new so- 
ciety. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of 
the working class. Its exterminators, history has al- 
ready nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the 
prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them. 



APPENDIX 



ANTI-PLEBISCITE MANIFESTO 

(See notes, pages 23 and 24.) 

In the notes on pages 2;^ and 24 relative to the plebiscite sub- 
mitted to the French people by Louis Bonaparte, reference is made 
to the "Anti-Plebiscite Manifesto" issued by the Paris Sections 
of the International in conjunction with the Federal Chamber 
of Labor Societies. The following translation of the manifesto 
has been made especially for this edition of The Paris Com- 
mune: 

ANTI-PLEBISCITE MANIFESTO ISSUED BY THE FED- 
ERATED PAPJSIAN SECTIONS OF THE INTERNA- 
TIONAL WORKINGMEN'S ASSOCIATION AND THE 
FEDERAL CHAMBER OF LABOR SOCIETIES. 

To All French Workingmen: 

Citizens — After the Revolution of 1789 and the Declaration of 
Rights of 1793, the sovereignty of labor is the only constitutive 
basis upon which modern society should rest. 

Labor is, in effect, the supreme law of humanity, the source 
of public wealth, and the most efficient cause of individual well- 
being. 

The workingman alone is entitled to the esteem of his fellow- 
citizens ; he imposes even upon those who exploit him a sense of 
his honesty; he is called upon to regenerate the old order. 

This is why we say to the urban and rural workers, to the 
small manufacturers, to the small business men, and to all those 
who sincerely desire the reign of liberty founded upon equality: 
It is not enough to answer by a purely negative vote this plebis- 
cite that they have the audacity to thrust upon us; not enough 
to prefer the constitution of 1870 to that of 1852 — a parliamen- 

107 



io8 APPENDIX 

tary government to a personal one. Out of the ballot-box must 
come the most absolute condemnation of the monarchic regime, 
the complete, the radical affirmation of the only form of govern- 
ment that can give scope to our legitimate aspirations — the 
Social and Democratic Republic. 

Insensate is he who would believe that the constitution of 1870 
would enable him, any more than that of 1852, to assure to his 
children the benefits of integral, free, and obligatory instruction 
for all ! _ 

That it would allow the reformation and the reorganization of 
the great public services (mines, canals, railroads, banks, etc.) 
for the benefit of all, instead of being as they are to-day, a means 
of exploitation for the feudality of capital ! 

The complete changing of the mode of levying taxes, which 
until now have been progressive in the direction of poverty ! 

The restoration to the public domain of the properties which 
the clergy, secular and regular, have seized upon by subreption 
in defiance of the laws of 1789 and 1790! 

The putting an end to the abuse of power by all the govern- 
mental functionaries great and small (constables, juges d' instruc- 
tion, commissaires de police, etc.), whose arbitrary conduct is 
to-day covered by article 75 of the Constitution of the year VIII ! 

And finally, the suppression of the blood-tax (the standing 
army) by abolishing the conscription ! 

No ! Citizens, such could not be the case. Despotism has the 
fatal quality of being able to engender only despotism. The test 
has been made. 

And, moreover, we refuse to recognize in the executive the 
right to question us. This right would imply on our part a sub- 
jection against which the very name of the power that arrogates 
it protests when that power indicates that he is not the master, 
but only and nothing more than the executor of the sovereign will 
of the nation. 

If then, with us, you desire to put an end to all the defilements 
of the past ; if you desire that the new social compact, consented 
to by citizens, equals in rights as in duties, shall assure to each 
of you peace and liberty, equality and work; if you want to af- 
firm the Social and Democratic Republic, the best means as we 
see it is either to refuse to vote or else vote against the consti- 
tution — and this without excluding the other modes of protesta- 
tion. 

Workers of all crafts, remember the massacres at Aubin and at 
la Ricamarie, the convictions at Autun and the acquittal at Tours ; 
and, while you take your ballots to show that you are not indif; 
ferent to your civic duties, remember to abstain from voting. 

Workers of the country districts ! Like your city brothers you 
bear the crushing burdens of the present social system ; you pro- 
duce without ceasing, and the most of the time you lack the neces- 
saries of life, while the fisc, the usurer, and the proprietors thrive 
at your expense. 

The Empire, not satisfied at crushing you with taxes, takes 



ANTI-PLEBISCITE MANIFESTO 109 

from yoit your sons, your only support, to make papal soldiers 
of them, or to strew their abandoned corpses over the desert 
plains of Syria, Cochin-China and Mexico. 

We likewise advise you to abstain from voting, because absten- 
tion is the protest that the author of the coup d'etat fears the 
most; but if you are compelled to cast your ballot, let it either 
remain blank or bear the words: Radical change in taxation! 
No more conscription! The Social and Democratic Republic! 

For the Federated Parisian Sections of the International Work- 
ingmen's Association: 

A. CoMBAULT, rue de Vaugirard, 289. 
Reymond, rue de I'Ouest, 80. 
Germain Casse, rue de Maubeuge, 94. 
Berthomieu^ member of the Commission of the Inter- 
national. 
Lafargue, member of the Vaugirard Section. 
E. Lefevre^ rue des Martyrs, 99. 
Jules Johannard, rue d'Aboukir, 126. 
J. Franquin, rue de la Verrerie, 42. 

For the Federal Chamber of Labor Societies: 

A. Theisz^ carver, rue de Jessaint, 12. 

Camelinat, bronze-mounter, rue Folie-Mericourt, 34. 

AvRiAL, machinist, passage Raoul, 15. 

D. Andre^ cabinet-maker, rue Neuve-des-Boulets, 17. 

Destetti^ rue des Boulangers, 16. 

PiNDY, joiner, rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, 17. 

RoBiLLARD_, gilder, rue de Sevres, 113. 

RouvEYROLE, goldsmith, rue Lesage, 16. 



no APPENDIX 



''BLOODY WEEK*' 

Capitalist Vengeance. — The Quick-Lime Death-Pits of 

MONTPARNASSE. — SLAUGHTER AT THE MuR DES FeDERES. — 

The Murderer Galliffet and the Traitor Millerand. — 
Communards Buried Alive. — Children Fifteen Years of 
Age Included in the Slaughter. — Doomed Men Com- 
pelled to Walk Over the Corpses of their Murdered 
Comrades. 

By Lucien Sanial. 

(See page 98.) 

The atrocities of the "Bloody Week" — Semaine Sanglante is 
the name under which that terrible week has passed into history 
— were but in part, and we may say in very small part, known 
to Marx when he wrote these lines ; for at that particular moment, 
and for several days thereafter, he had no other source of infor- 
mation than the incomplete and disconnected reports of the London 
dailies. In order to form an approximate idea of their extent and 
savagery, it is necessary to read the thrilling account which Lis- 
sagaray gives of them in his History of the Commune. As the 
merit of his narrative is not only in its accuracy, but in its consec- 
utiveness, and as we cannot here reproduce it in full, we shall 
not mutilate it into extracts. But the contemporary testimony of 
the capitalist press, which is not now so readily accessible as 
Lissagaray's book, has also a special value, and to Marx's quota- 
tion from a " Tory organ " we may add a few others, typical of 
the many of the same sort that might be made from the published 
letters of newspaper correspondents and editorial utterances of 
journalists who witnessed the horrible scenes which they de- 
scribed. 

The Paris Temps stated that " immense pits ten meters (thirty- 
three feet) square and equally deep have been dug at the Mont- 
parnasse cemetery, in which layers of twenty corpses each, 
covered with lime, are superposed." According to the Paris 
Liberie the Champs de Mars was used for a similar purpose, and 
the bodies were thrown pellmell into deep trenches. The Theatre 



"BLOODY WEEK" in 

Frangais Square, the Pigalle Square, and many other places were 
used for hasty burial, in fear of pestilence. " There are," stated 
that paper, " streets in Paris in which the dead bodies are being 
accumulated and in every house of which a number of corpses 
are awaiting interment." . . . "On the Saint Michel Boule- 
vard, stages are driven to each barricade and may then be seen 
slowly filling up as with a tide of cadavres. The sight of limbs 
hanging out of these stages is ghastly beyond expression." Num- 
bers of those who had been shot at the Loban barracks and other 
places in proximity to the river were expeditiously throv/n into it. 
The reporter of a conservative paper, says Camille Pelletan, took 
the trouble of counting those he had seen floating in the course of 
a short walk along the quay : he called that " la peche au federe." 
The Petite Presse noticed a long and persistent streak of blood 
in the river, passing under the second arch of the Tuilleries 
bridge and running swiftly far out of sight. 

In his testimony before the legislative Commission of Inquiry, 
instituted with a view to whitewashing the Versailles government, 
the bourgeois senator Cambon had to declare that in his opinion 
the number of prisoners shot by the troops had been greater than 
the actual number of fighting men behind the barricades. 

The last stand of the Parisian proletariat was at the Pere la 
Chaise cemetery. In commenting on this final scene of the great 
drama, the Temps said two days later : " More than ten thousand 
Federals, killed at that place and in its immediate neighborhood, 
have already been buried. Many corpses are still lying piled up in 
family chapels." They were not all, of course, killed in battle. 
Many prisoners — men, women, and children — had been taken, 
two hundred at the time, to the foot of a wall now known as the 
Mur des Federes (the Federals' Wall), and been shot with 
mitrailleuses, their bodies immediately falling into a deep, wide, 
and long trench dug in front of them. On the day following the 
adjournment of the International Congress of 1900, the delegates 
went in a procession to the Mur des Federes. But the Millerand- 
Galliffet-Waldeck police cut the procession into several small 
bodies and would not allow more than one speech to be delivered. 

The London Daily News of June 8, 1871, printed the following 
from its Paris correspondent : — 

The column of prisoners halted in the Avenue Uhrlch, and 
was drawn up, four or five deep, on the footway facing to the 
road. General Marquis de Galliffet and his staff dismounted 



112 APPENDIX 

and commenced an inspection from the left of the line. Walk- 
ing down slowly and eying the ranks, the General stopped here 
and there, tapping a man on the shoulder or beckoning him out 
of the rear ranks. In most cases, without further parley, the 
individual thus selected was marched out into the center of the 
road, where a small supplementary column was thus soon formed. 
. . . It was evident that there v/as considerable room for 
error. A mounted officer pointed out to General Galliffet a man 
and a woman for some particular offense. The woman, rushing 
out of the ranks, threw herself on her knees, and, with out- 
stretched arms, protested her innocence in passionate terms. The 
General waited for a pause, and then with most impassable face 
and unmoved demeanor said : " Madame, I have visited every 
theater in Paris, your acting will have no effect on me" (ce n'est 
pas la peine de jouer la comedie). ... It was not a good 
thing on that day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older, 
or uglier than one's neighbors. One individual in particular 
struck me as probably owing his speedy release from the ills of 
this world to his having a broken nose. . . . Over a hun- 
dred being thus chosen, a firing party told off, and the column 
resumed its march, leaving them behind. A few minutes after- 
v/ards a dropping fire in our rear commenced, and continued for 
over a quarter of an hour. It was the execution of these sum- 
marily-convicted wretches. 

This Galliffet, " the kept man of his wife, so notorious for her 
shameless exhibitions at the orgies of the Second Empire," went 
during the war by the name of the French " Ensign Pistol." And 
it was with this Galliffet, as Minister of War, that the " Socialist " 
Millerand, as Minister of Commerce, entered the Waldeck- 
Rousseau cabinet of the so-called Republican Defense, formed at 
the time of the Dreyfus affair ! The murderer Galliffet and the 
traitor Millerand ! Fit colleagues indeed in a bourgeois con- 
spiracy having in view the disorganization of the sociahst move- 
ment and the consequent perpetuation of wage-slavery ! 

The London Evening Standard of June 8, 1871, printed this 
paragraph from its Paris correspondent : — 

The Temps, which Is a careful journal, and not given to sensa- 
tion, tells a dreadful story of people imperfectly shot and buried 
before life was extinct. A great number were buried 
in the square round St. Jacques-la-Boucherie ; some of them very 
superficially. In the daytime the roar of the busy streets pre- 
vented any notice being taken; but in the stillness of the night 
the inhabitants of the houses in the neighborhood were roused by 
distant moans, and in the morning a clenched hand was seen pro- 
truding through the soil. In consequence of this, exhumations 



"BLOODY WEEK" 113 

were ordered to take place. . . . That many wounded have 
been buried aHve I have not the sHghtest doubt. One case I can 
vouch for. When Brunei was shot with his mistress on the 24th 
ult., in the courtyard of a house in the Place Vendome, the bodies 
lay there until the afternoon of the 27th. When the burial party 
came to remove the corpses, they found the woman living still, 
and took her to an ambulance. Though she had received four 
bullets, she is now out of danger. 

Other details of the capitalist atrocities during the "Bloody 
Week " appeared in the capitalist papers of Paris. A few extracts 
gleaned at random are here given : — 

In the early morning a thick cordon of troops is drawn in front 
of the Chatelet Theater, where sits a prevotal court. From time 
to time groups of fifteen to twenty persons, composed of na- 
tional guards, civilians, women, and children fifteen or sixteen 
years old, are seen coming out of the theater. They were taken 
in arms (?) or "otherwise convicted of participation in the re- 
sistance." Death is their sentence. They walk two by two, sur- 
rounded by chasseurs, and, following the quay, soon reach the 
Loban barracks. A minute later a musketry fire is heard : they 
are dead. — From the Paris Debats, May 31, 1871. 

It is at the Bourse [Stock Exchange; a fit place, to be sure, 
for this sort of business] that there was to-day the largest num- 
ber of executions. ^ The doomed men who attempted to resist 
were bound to the iron raihng. — From the Paris Francais, May 
28, 1871. 

The Military School and the Monceau Park have been trans- 
formed into prisons. Executions are also taking place there. 
Some of the doomed men are displaying extraordinary indiffer- 
ence and energy. Compelled to pass over the corpses of those 
who have already been shot, they jump quite smartly. — From the 
Paris Petite Presse, May 26, 1871. 

In the Madelaine church, our soldiers did not rest until they 
had killed with the bayonet every one of the many insurgents who 
had taken refuge there. — From the Paris Soir. 



114 APPENDIX 



JULES FAVRE ON THE INTERNATIONAL 

The following letter appeared in the London Times of June 13, 
1871. It was written by the Secretary of the International 
Workingmen's Association, and affords a good insight into the 
character of Jules Favre. The few lines of comment following 
the letter are taking from the standard German edition of The 
Civil War in France, edited by Frederick Engels and published in 
Berlin in 1891 : — 

To the Editor of the Times: 

Sir — On June 6, 1871, M. Jules Favre issued a circular to all the 
European Powers, calling upon them to hunt down the Interna- 
tional Workingmen's Association. A few remarks will suffice to 
characterize that document. 

In the very preamble of our statutes it is stated that the Inter- 
national was founded " September 28, 1864, at a public meeting 
held at St. Martin's Hall, Long-acre, London." For purposes 
of his own, Jules Favre puts back the date of its origin beyond 
1862. 

In order to explain our principles, he professes to quote their 
[the International's] sheet of the 2Sth of March, 1869. And then 
what does he quote? The sheet of a society which is not the 
International. This sort of manoeuvre he already recurred to 
when, still a comparatively young lawyer, he had to defend the 
National newspaper, prosecuted for libel by Cabet. Then he pre- 
tended to read extracts from Cabet's pamphlets while reading 
interpolations of his own — a trick exposed while the court was 
sitting, and which, but for the indulgence of Cabet, would have 
been punished by Jules Favre's expulsion from the Paris bar. 
Of all the documents quoted by him as documents of the Inter- 
national, not one belongs to the International. He says, for in- 
stance, "The Alliance declares itself Atheist, says the General 
Council, constituted in London in July, 1869." The General 
Council never issued such a document. ^ On the contrary, it is- 
sued a document which quashed the original statutes of the " Al- 
liance'' — U Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste at Geneva — 
quoted by Jules Favre. 

Throughout his circular, which pretends in part also to be 
directed against the Empire, Jules Favre repeats against the Inter- 
national but the police inventions of the public prosecutors of the 
Empire, and which broke down miserably even before the law 
courts of that Empire. 

It is known that in Its two addresses (of July and September 
last) on the late war, the General Council of the International 



JULES FAVRE ON THE INTERNATIONAL 115 

denounced the Prussian plan of conquest against France. Later 
on Mr. Reitlinger, Jules Favre's private secretary, applied, though 
of course in vain, to some members of the General Council for 
getting up by the Council a demonstration against Bismarck, in 
favor of the Government of National Defense; they were par- 
ticularly requested not to mention the Republic. The prepara- 
tions for a demonstration with regard to the expected arrival of 
Jules Favre in London were made — certainly with the best of 
intentions — in spite of the General Council, which in its address 
of the 9th of September had distinctly forewarned the Paris work- 
men against Jules Favre and his colleagues. 

What would Jules Favre say if in its turn the International 
were to send a circular on Jules Favre to all the cabinets of 
Europe, drawing their particular attention to the documents pub- 
lished at Paris by the late M. Milliere? 

I am, Sir, your obedient servant, 

John Hales, 

Secretary to the General Council of the International Working- 
men's Association. 

256 High Holborn St., W. C, June 12, 1871. 

In an article on the " International Association and Its Objects," 
the London Spectator, like the pious informer that it is, quotes, 
among other similar meritorious performances, and even more 
fully than Jules Favre has done it, the above mentioned docu- 
ment of the "Alliance" as the work of the International; and 
that was done eleven days after the publication of the above 
rejoinder in the Times. This does not surprise us. Long ago, 
Frederick the Great used to say that of all the Jesuits the Pro- 
testant ones are the worst. 



i6 



APPENDIX 



PERSONNEL OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF 
THE INTERNATIONAL 



The two manifestoes of the International Workingmen's Asso- 
ciation on the Franco-Prussian War carried the following signa- 
tures : — 

THE GENERAL COUNCIL 



Robert Applegarth 
Martin J. Boon. 
Fred. Bradnick. 
Caihil. 
John Hales. 
William Hales. • 
George Harris. 
Fred Lessner. 
Laysatine. 
B. Lucraft. 
George Milner. 



Thomas Mottershead. 
Charles Murray. 
George Odger. 
James Parnell. 
Pfander. 

RiJHL. 

Joseph Shepherd. 
CowELL Stepney. 
Stoll. 
Schmitz. 



CORRESPONDING SECRETARIES 



Eugene Dupont, for France. 

Karl Marx, for Germany and 
Russia. 

A. Serrailler, for Belgium, 
Holland and Spain. 

Hermann Jung, for Switzer- 
land. 



Giovanni Bora, for Italy. 
Zevy Maurice, for Hungary. 
Anton Zabicki, for Poland. 
James Cohen, for Denmark. 
J. G. Eccarius, for the United 
States. 



WILLIAM TOWNSHEND, Chairman. 

JOHN WESTON, Treasurer. 

J. GEORGE ECCARIUS, General Secretary. 



Offices : 
1870. 



256 High Holborn, London W. C, September 9th, 



THE GENERAL COUNCIL 117 

The manifesto on the Civil War in France carried the following 
signatures : — 

THE GENERAL COUNCIL 

M. J. Boon. Thomas Mottershead. 

Fred. Bradnick. Charles Murray. 

G. H. Buttery. George Odger. 

Caihil. Pfander. 

William Hales. Ruhl. 

KoLB. Sadler. 

Lessner. Cowell Stepney. 

B. Lucraft. William Townshend. 
George Milner. 

CORRESPONDING SECRETARIES 

Eugene Dupont, for France. P. Giovacchini, for Italy, 

Karl Marx^ for Germany and Zevy Maurice, for Hungary. 

Holland. Anton Zabicki, for Poland. 

Frederick Engels, for Belgium James Cohen, for Denmark. 

and Spain. J. G. Eccarius, for the United 
Hermann Jung, for Switzer- States. 

land. 

HERMANN JUNG, Chairman. 
JOHN WESTON, Treasurer. 
GEORGE HARRIS, Financial Secretary. 
JOHN HALES, General Secretary. 

Offices: 256 High Holborn, London W. C, May 30th, 1871. 






FROM U TOPIA TO SCIENCE. 

By FREDERICK ENGELS. 

Translated From the German by DANIEL DE liEON, 

"The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science" is probably the 
most valuable book written by Engels. It is especially valuable to-day, when 
the literary parasites of the capitalist class are flooding the press with essays 
labeled "Socialism," in which everything is called Socialism from a "profit- 
sharing" bakery to the Government Printing OflSce. In "TheDevelopment of 
Socialism from Utopia to Science," Engels traces historically and economically 
the growth of Socialism, and in this translation a studied attempt has been 
made to avoid all purely scholastic or academic terms, and to convey the idea 
of the author in that plain and simple language that is adapted to the 
proletariat. 

Perhaps the most valuable feature of the new edition Is the subhead- 
ings — they give a clear idea of the subject matter of each page, and will 
materially aid the student. 

CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. — Utopian Socialism. — Two Aspects of Modern Socialism — The 
Forerunners of the Proletariat — The Reign of Reason and the Reign of 
Terror — Rudimental Stage of Capitalist Production — The Founders of 
Socialism — Saint Simon Perceives the Class Strugggle — Fourier Dis- 
covers the Vices of Capitalism — Owen Becomes a Communist and Is 
Ostracized — Owen's Influence of the Working Class Movement — Effect 
of Utopian Thought. 

CHAPTER II. — Metaphysics, Dialectics, and the Materialist Conception ot 
History — Metaphysical Reasoning : Bacon and Locke — Dialectical Rea- 
soning : Kant and Kegel — Idealist Conception of Nature — Materialist 
Conception of Nture — Idealist Conception of History — Materialist 
Conception of History — Socialism Becomes a Science. 

CHAPTER III. Scientific Socialism. — Basis of the Materialist Conception 
of History — Capitalist Class Destroys Feudal Society — Historic Role of 
the Capitalist Class — Capitalist Concentration Begins — Wage Slavery 
Begins — Capitalist Production Revolutionizes Industry — Effect of Ma- 
chinery on the Working Class — Effect of Machinery on the Capitalist 
Class — Industrial Crises Become Permanent — Mode of Production Rebels 
Against Mode of Exchange — Stock Companies Prove That the Capitalist 
Class Is Superfluous — Government Ownership Is Not Socialism — The 
Socialist Revolution — The "State" Dies a Natural Death — The "Classes" 
Are Abolished — The Socialist Republic Appears. 

CHAPTER IV. Recapitulation. — Nature of Medieval Society — Nature of 
Capitalist Revolution — Nature of Socialist Revolution. 

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Class Struggle. 



By KAR£i KAUTSKY. 

Translated From the German and Adapted to America 
by DANIEI. BE LEON. 

The struggle for supremacy between the Working Class and the Capitalist 
Class becomes more marked and acute as capitalist production develops. 
"The Class Struggle" gives a comprehensive description of the nature of the 
contest, its history, and its inevitable outcome. Each page is replete with 
facts for the Socialist. "The Class Struggle" is the third of the "Kautsky 
Pamphlets." It should be followed by "The Socialist Republic." 

CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. — Socialism and the Property-Holding Classes. — Why the 
Rich Will Not Become Socialists — Property-Holding Classes Are Tied to 
Capitalist Production. 

CHAPTER II. — Servants and Menials. — The Servant Class Is the Foe of the 
Workiug Class. 

CHAPTER III. — The Slums. — The Slums Are the Allies of the Capitalist 
Class. 

CHAPTER IV. — Philanthropy and Labor Legislation. — Capitalism Develops 
Pauperism — Vv^hy Capitalists Would Not Abolish Poverty if They Could — 
Importance of Factory Laws. 

CHAPTER V. — The Political Struggle. — How the Capitalists Render Labor 
Unions Ineffective— Proletariat Begins Struggle by Alliances with the 
Capitalist Class — Political --lliances with the Cspitalist Class End— 
The Socialist Labor Party Appears — Certainty of the Ultimate Triumph 
of the Proletariat — Why the Proletariat Is Bound to End All Exploita- 
tion. 

CHAPTER VI. — The Labor Movement and Socialism. — Development of the 
Labor Movement — Utopian Socialists Were Hostile to the Labor Move- 
ment- — ^"Labor Socialists" Were Hostile to the Class Struggle — Socialism 
of a Hundred Years Ago the Anarchism of To-day. 

CHAPTER VII. — The Socialist Labor Party — Union of the Labor Movement 
and Socialism. — The Socialist Labor Party and the Class Struggle — • 
Objects and Results of the Class Struggle. 

CHAPTER VIII. — Internationality of the Socialist Labor Party. — Devslop"- 
ment of International Capitalism — Development of International Social- 
ism — Internationality of the Class Struggle — Marx Organizes the Inter- 
national Association of Workingmen — The "International" Falls with the 
Paris Commune — Later Evidences of International Working Class Soli- 
darity. 

CHAPTER IX. — The Socialist Labor Party and the People.— ^The Socialist 
Labor Party the Friend of the Working Class — The Socialist Labor 
Party the Friend of the Small Producer — When and W^hy Socialists 
Oppose the Small Producer — Small Production Cannot Defend Itself 
•Against Capitalism. 

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AT IS CAPITAL? 

By FERDINAND LASSALLE. 

The Socialist proceeds upon the scientific plan that nothing but confusion can 
result from discussion unless there is a rigid adherence to the proper use of 
terms, and in the Organized Socialist Movement throughout the world the 
terms of Socialist Science are defined in as uniform a manner as language dif- 
ferences permit. Inasmuch as the central demand of Socialism is that Capital be 
collectively owned, it is especially necessary for an understanding of Socialism 
that absolute clearness be had in the use of this term. In "What Is Capital?" 
Lassalle draws the distinction between wealth that is Capital and wealth that is 
not Capital. He first punctures several bourgeois definitions of Capital, then 
gives the characteristics of the principal industrial systems from Slavery through 
Feudalism to Capitalism, and traces clearly the growth lof Capital from its 
earliest historical appearance. The following summary of the book will be useful 
to the student: 

CONTENTS. 

Capitalist Fallacies.— Fallacy of the definition that "capital is the instru- 
ments of labor"— Fallacy of the definition that "capital is hoarded labor" — Fal- 
lacy of the definition that "capital consists of products which are continually 
applied to further production. 

Industrial Society in Civilized Antiquity. — Ancient property-owner possessed 
land, slaves, all products of labor, and all instruments of labor, yet he was not a 
■capitalist — Difference between master and capitalist — How the ancient landowner 
and slave-holder disposed of his surplus — Growth of interest-bearing capital — 
Roman Republic and the Church condemned the taking of interest— Jeremy Ben- 
tham and later political economists declare interest the most "natural right" of 
^mankind — Reasons for this contradiction — In antiquity money was borrowed on 
account of personal neediness; under Capitalism money is borrowed to "do busi- 
ness," to get more money — Nature of production under the ancient economic 
system— Difference between the wealth of antiquity and the capital of modern 
times. 

Industrial Society in the Middle Ages. — Seigneur and serf— 'People did not 
live on produce of fields alone — Production was well developed— Slavery did not 
exist— Serfdom softens down to a system of personal service— Industrial organiza- 
tion of feudalism — Work which the serfs had to do for the feudal lord — Work 
which the "free farmer" had to do for the feudal lord — Dues which the feudal 
lord received from other sources — Guild restrictions made Industrial Capitalism 
impossible in the Middle Ages — Capitalist system begins in world of com- 
merce— 'Guild restrictions are gradually thrown off — Capitalism appears with 
"free competition" — Analysis of industrial and agricultural productions during 
this period. 

Industrial Society Under Capitalism.— jyuring the Middle Ages prices are fixed 
by the producer — Under Capitalism prices are fixed by coat of production — Effect 
of free competition upon the employer — Effect of free competition upon the 
worker— Oscillations in market prices injure individual capitalists, but not 
the capitalist class— Wages are determined by the necessary means of 
subsistence — Cost of "producing a worker"— Effect of a rise in the 
price of labor— Why laborers become poorer and poorer under capitalism — 
Fallacy of the statement that the profit of the capitalist is the "reward for his 
management" — Fallacy of the statement that the profit of the capitalist is the 
"reward of his abstinence"— Contrast of the commencement of the historical period 
(slavery) with the end of the historical period (Capitalism), 

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SOCIALIST 

ALMANAC. 



The monographs on Italy and Spain 
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tened itself to the international pro- 
letariat.— Introduction to •'Socialist 
Almanac." 



A BOOK THAT EVERY WORKINQMAN SHOULD READ. 

By LuciEN Sanial, formerly editor of "The People," the 
official organ of the Socialist Labor Party. A handbook 
on the history and economics of Socialism. Prepared 
under the direction of the National Executive Committee 
of the Socialist Labor Party. 

The Science of Modern Socialism is based upon facts. To present this 
Science, the Socialist must be equipped with the facts upon which it rests, 
while he who would attempt to refute the Science must also be equipped with 
those facts. With the object of making these facts easily accessible to friend 
and foe alike, the National Convention of the Socialist Labor Party held in 
1896 Instructed the National Executive Committee to have prepared a book 
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TERRITORIAL EXPAINSIOIN. 

By liUCIEN SANIAIi. 

"Territorial Expansion" has been written to show what a trustworthy 
guide the Socialist conception of history Is in tracing the causes of the rush 
for territorial expansion by modern capitalist nations in general and by the 
United States in particular. In the words of the author, "They must expand 
abroad or burst." The relation of territorial expansion to the interests of the 
Working Class is treated In a spirit that is genuinely Socialist ; and "surplus 
value," which is the basis of Capitalist exploitation of the Working Class, is 
clearly explained. 

CONTENTS. 



Balance of Trade. 
Popular Fallacies : 

1. Protection and Surplus Value. 

2. Free Trade and Surplus Value. 

3. Exchange and Surplus Value. 
Suffocation by Wealth. 

Effect on Working Class of De- 
creased Purchasing Power. 

Profits and Falling Prices. 

How Capitalists "Realize" the Sur- 
plus Value of Labor. 

Historic Course of Commerce : 
1. Commercial Expansion. 



2. Territorial Expansion. 
Development of American Commerce : 
First Step — Use England's Commer- 
cial Machinery. 
Second Step — Establish Direct 
Commercial Agencies and Build 
Up a Mercantile Marine. 
Third Step — Territorial Expan- 
sion : Cuba, Porto Rico and the 
Phlliplnes. 
Logic of the Situation. 
Attitude of the Socialiats. 
Inevltableness of Socialism. 



F>t*Ice, S cents. 



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By liUCIEN SANIAIi. 

This book is a most valuable one to all who would intelligently grasp the 
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Capitalism toward its own grave dug by its own forces. 

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The Iron and Steel Trusts. 
The Tobacco Trusts. 
The Whiskey, Beer, and Malt Trusts. 
The Grain, Flour, Biscuit, and Bak- 
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The Pulp and Paper Trusts. 
The Rubber Trusts. 



The Electricity Trusts. 

Other Great Trusts. 

The Middle Class. 

The Foreign Trade of the United 

States in 1880 and In 1898. 
Origin, Rise, and Decline of 

Middle Class. 



the 



German Trade Unionism. 



Price, 5 cents. 

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Manifesto of the Communist Party. 

BY KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS. 
Asthorized BnsrIIsh Translation. Edited and annotated by 

Fredbrick Enqbls. 

The "Manifesto of the Communist Party" was published In 

1848, as the platform of the "Commimist League," a working- 
men's association, which was first exclusively German, later on 
iriLornationa,!, and, under the political conditions of the Continent 
before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a congress of the 
League, held in Ixjndon in November, 1S47, Marx and iSngels 
were commissioned to prepare for ptiblication a coemplete theo- 
retical and practical program for the party. This pi-ogram was 
called the "Manifesto of the Communist Party." And the "Com- 
munist Manifesto," as it is now moie generally known, may be 
said to be the basis on which modern scientific socialism has 
built its world-wide structure. 

Relative to the principles on which the "Manifesto" is based, 
the following paragraph written by Engels will prove instruotive: 

The fundamental propK>sitic«i which forms the nucleus of the "Man- 
ifesto" belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical 
epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and 
the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis 
on which is built up, an^i from which alone can be explained, the po- 
litical and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the 
whole history of society (since the dissoluAjLon of primitive tribal so- 
ciety, holding land in common ownership,) has been a history of class 
struggles— contests between the exploiting an<i exploited clajises, !.he 
riding and the oppressed classes; that the history of these struggles 
forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has boon 
reached where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can- 
not attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling 
class (the bourgeoisie, the capitalists) without, at the same time, and 
once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, op- 
pression, class distinctions and class struggles. 

The principles enunciated in the "Manifesto" are as true to-day 
as they wesre fifty years ago, and it is upon these principles that 
the CHass Conscious Proletariat of the United States are hammer- 
ing their way to the Socialist Republic 

PUBLISHED BY TELB NEW YOBK LABOB NEWS COMPASS T FOB THE 
SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES. 

Price, 10 Cents. 



NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY. 

2, 4 and 6 New Reade Street, New York City, 



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